Linguistics Archives 2016

Address Forms: A Literature Review

Francesco Zappettini
University of British Columbia, Canada
2016

Abstract

Terms of address and reference have gained enormous interest in the literature,
ranging from sociolinguistics, ethnolinguistics, language learning, to anthropology.
From a sociolinguistic perspective, address terms can be considered as the starting
point to the understanding of human relationships, and how such relationships
can be socially and strategically constructed (Fitch 1991, Morford 1997, Leech
1999). Terms of address and reference, therefore, have been well recognized in
literature as a fruitful field for sociolinguistics research from the mid-1950s- 1970s,
through the 1980s- 1990s, and from the early 2000s to the present. The studies
conducted during these historical periods have made significant contributions to
the understanding of different pragmatic functions of address systems such as how
they convey solidarity, politeness, and politic behaviour (Brown and Gilman 1960,
Brown and Ford 1961, 1964, Brown and Levinson 1978, Watts 1989). However,
throughout the history of address research, there has also been lack of attention to
some aspects such as empirical data on how omissions of personal referents can be
understood as an official usage of address forms in some languages. This paper
discusses the significant contributions as well as omissions in the research
literature on address systems from the 1950s to the present.

Key words: Forms of address; Address systems; Sociolinguistics; Politeness; Face;

Speech acts; Relational work; Communication

1. Introduction

Some of the most-cited studies on terms of address and reference (to be referred to
as personal address forms from here onwards) are those by Brown, R. and Gilman,
(1960), Brown, R. and Ford (1961/1964), and Brown, P. and Levinson (1978).
These were, however, not the prioneering studies on the topic of address systems.
The fact is that long before the work of these scholars, as early as the eighteenth
century, Gedike (1794) had already started discussing the usage of personal
pronouns du and sie in German in his work, Uber Du und Sie in der Deutschen
Sparche. Then a century later appeared Chatelain’s (1880) study on the plural
pronoun in Latin. Noticeably, however, there seems to be a huge time gap between
that early study and the next generations, because very little was documented in
literature until the twentieth century, when personal address forms became a

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fruitful field of research. The early years of the twentieth century saw the
contribution of several scholars, who mainly focussed on different usages of
personal pronouns among European languages. For example, Johnston (1904)
discussed the use of ella, lei, and la as polite forms of address in Italian, Kennedy
(1915 & 1916) worked on the forms of address in English Literature of the
thirteenth century and early Middle English, and Stidston (1917) examined the use
of ye in the function of thou in fourteenth-century England.
Research literature on address forms in the decades from the 1920s to the late
1940s was based on studies that focussed on a much wider variety of languages.
Fay (1920) was among the first scholars to study in detail the French pronouns tu
and vous when they were employed in Molière’s plays. Another early study on
Italian personal pronouns was conducted by Grand (1930), who discussed the use
of the Italian pronouns tu, voi, and lei. Other studies were varied ranging from
German (Silverberg 1940), Annamese (former Vietnamese) (Spencer 1945, Benedict
1947, and Emeneau 1951), Mazateco (Cowan 1947), and Nuer (Evans-Pritchard
1948).

Nevertheless, as compared to the later decades to the present, it is noticeable that

studies on address terms have gained more interest since the mid-1950s. This
paper, therefore, attempts to illustrate the flourishing of those studies by dividing
them into three major phases starting from the mid-1950s -1970s, through the
1980s -1990s and from the early 2000s to the present. I classify the literature into
three generations of scholars reflecting these historical periods, with discussions of
the significant contributions offered in each phase, and general omissions that we
find in the literature.

2. The 1950s-1970s studies

This first generation of literature consists of early sociolinguistic studies that

investigated the use of address terms by focusing on familial settings and social
relationships. Among the early studies of interest are the following: Schneider and
Homans’ (1955) discussion of kinship terminology and the American kinship
system, Chao’s (1956) work on the vocative and designative use of Chinese address
terms, Lounsbury’s (1956) analysis of kinship usage among speakers of the Pawnee
language, Searle’s (1958) study on proper names, and Martin’s (1964) discussion of
speech levels and social structure in Japan and Korea.

Roger Brown and his colleagues, Albert Gilman and Marguerite Ford are the
pioneering sociolinguists who had strong interests in the investigation of address
forms, in particular, the use of address pronouns and the distinctions between T/V
(Latin tu / vos or French tu / vous), nominal address forms, the pronouns of power
and solidarity. In one of their earliest studies on the theory of address, Gilman and
Brown (1958) explored the pronouns of address and their differentiation in
European languages in which they argued that there were two different dimensions
of pronominal usage since the rise in the use of the plural address. The ‘vertical
status dimension’ suggested that plural/ polite pronoun (V) was used to refer to
superiors, and the singular/ familiar pronoun (T) was used to refer to inferiors.
Meanwhile, the ‘horizontal status dimension’ suggested that the plural/ polite
pronoun (V) was used among strangers of equal status, and the singular/ familiar
(T) was to be used among people of equal status and those with intimate
relationships. These two fundamental dimensions were employed in the analyses of

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the histories of pronouns of address in French, English, German, and Italian.

Gilman and Brown (1960) later pointed out the lack of pronominal differentiation in
English, even though there did exist nominal differentiation in the language.
Similarly, in discussing hypersentences, Sadock (1969) claimed that it was the
status relationship between the speaker and the hearer that determined the use of
second-person pronoun rather than the interlocutor’s status itself. This is because
a social relationship existing between the interlocutors will define a context –
distant or intimate- in which either T or V is appropriate.

Also starting with pronominal differentiation, but in their later paper, Brown and
Gilman (1960, pp. 253-76) discussed further the ‘semantic evolution’ of the
pronouns of address, semantic differences among the pronouns of French,
German, and Italian, and argued that there is “a connection between social
structure, group ideology, and the semantics of the pronoun”. In the early years of
research in this area it was believed that it is the ‘power semantic’ that governed
European T/V usage, which means that superiors were addressed as V, and
inferiors, T. Also, reciprocal V was used among upper-class speakers, while
reciprocal T was used among lower-class speakers. However, the ‘power semantic’
was later said to be dominated by ‘solidarity semantic’, which is a re-evaluation of
social features, resulting in a mutual T being used in intimate relationships and V
otherwise, with an extended use of T subsequently. Significantly, Brown and
Gilman’s studies on address behaviour among French, German, and Italian
communities revealed that switches of address forms to T happen when the
speaker wishes to express anger or intimacy; and likewise, changes to V when they
wish to express respect or distance. It is, therefore, important to note that the
expression of emotion via the various uses of forms of address was revealed in early
studies and this issue was investigated even further in subsequent research
scholarship alongside other thematic areas.

Brown and Ford’s (1961) examination of nominal address in American English is

also among the earliest studies on intimacy and distance, in which a significant
contrast in the use of first name (FN) and titles + last name (TLN) as forms of
address was revealed. It is suggested from their study that FN is used reciprocally,
while TLN is used only among people who are not acquaintances. Also, intimacy
and distance are the two important factors that determine the choice of form of
address. Therefore, Brown and Ford claimed that as acquaintances grow more
informal, the forms of address tend to switch towards intimacy, for instance, from
Mrs. Brown to Jenny. Other studies that shared this point of view and illustrated
how closeness, sincerity, and informality is conveyed via the choice of second-
personal pronoun include those by Gottfried (1970), Almasov (1974), and Vargas
(1974), who worked on American varieties of Spanish.

Other important studies during the 1960s illustrate how address forms reflect
social relationships across different languages. Conant (1961), for example,
examined kin systems of reference and address in Jarawa, Beidelman (1963)
considered terms of address used in modern society as clues to social
relationships, Foster (1964) showed how social distance is conveyed among
Spanish-speaking villagers in Mexico, Otterbein (1964) examined the usage of in-
law terminology on Andros Island, and Friedrich (1966b and 1966a) studied
Russian pronominal usage. Some other languages that also received interest during
this decade include Yao (Mbaga and Whiteley 1961), Yiddish (Slobin 1963), Nuer
(Evans-Pritchard 1964), Icelandic (Jones 1965), Thai (Thompson 1965), Burmese
(Thompson 1965), Vietnamese (Thompson 1965, Cooke 1968), Canadian French

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(Lambert 1967), Indonesian (Wittermans 1967), Bengal (Das 1968), and Hindi (Jain
1969).

Studies dealing with forms of address have often referred to Ervin-Tripp (1972) in
their bibliography. Although her research is not among the earliest studies of
address forms, Ervin-Tripp’s major influence on research in this field lies in her
method of diagramming selection of forms of address, in which she used a
computer flow chart to illustrate the effects of determining factors on the choice
among the variants.

Among the earliest studies on kin terms are Tyler (1966), D’Andrade’s (1970), Blom
and Gumperz’s (1972), and Casson’s (1975). Tyler (1966) adapted a standard device
of formal analysis of kinship terminology, which has been called componential
analysis from then on. Later, in his study on the use of kinship terminology in
Koya, a language spoken by residents of villages along the banks of the Godavari
River in India, Tyler argued that it is necessary to extend formal rules to contextual
factors in the analysis of kinship terminology. From another perspective, Casson
(1975, p. 229) followed an approach that aims to specify “the meaning
communicated in the situated interpersonal use of kinship terms” in his study of
the social meaning in kinship term usage in a Turkish village. It is emphasized
that, once again, the ‘interactive’ meaning (Casson, 1972), conveyed by the use of a
kinship term, is determined by the social relationship between the people involved
in a speech event. Also, discussing the different meanings of kinship terms, Bloch
(1971) investigated moral and tactical meanings of kinship terms in Malagasy.
Other studies of kinship terms include Shanmugam’s (1972) on the Tamil
language, Buu’s (1972) on Vietnamese, Schusky’s (1974) on various languages,
Casson’s (1975) on Turkish and Naden’s (1976) on kinship terms in the Ghanaian
culture.

Apart from kinship terms, scholars during the period between the late 1960s and
1970s were also concerned about various aspects of address forms, such as
different terms used in different social settings, grammatical and semantic issues
related to personal pronouns, and social etiquette and politeness. With regards to
the relation between language use and social settings, McIntire (1972) and Baron
(1978) were interested in academic setting, whereas Slobin and Porter (1968) were
concerned about the terms used in business, and Jonz (1975) studied terms that
are used in the U.S. Marine Corporation. There was also growing interest in the use
of address terms according to regional difference, for example, northern vs
southern, and rural vs urban that was shared among studies by Vatuk (1969) on a
language spoken in North India, Filbeck (1973) on Thai, and Kess and Juricic
(1978) on the Slovene language. Gender and sexism were also areas of concern
during this period, particularly in studies by Hook (1974), Kramer (1975), Ullrich
(1975), Fiske (1978), and McConnell-Genet (1978). Other major issues of interest
are related to personal names (Goodenough 1965, Adler 1978), social etiquette and
politeness (Ullrich 1975), Takao (1976), Brown and Levinson (1978), and respect
(Casson and Ozertug 1976, Hill and Kenneth 1978).

The next section discusses research literature on address forms during the period
from the 1980s to the 1990s.

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3. The 1980s- 1990s studies

The next few years (the generation from the 1980s to the 1990s) witnessed the
development of research on the shared relationship of solidarity or differences in
power relationships reflected in reciprocal or non-reciprocal use of the T/V
pronouns and politeness, political function of address terms, and the parameters of
dominance and social distance. Although there were controversies in terminological
usage, for example, between the terms power and solidarity, or between distance
and intimacy, and politeness/ impoliteness, this generation of studies set a strong
foundation for our current and evolving knowledge of address forms.

Early in the decade of 1980s there appeared Hudson’s (1980) interest in the
connection between forms of address and cultural patterns such as social values,
beliefs, and customs. Sharing Hudson’s interest is Mehrotar (1981). In his
discussion of the non-kin forms of address in Hindi in relation to sociocultural
setting dyads, Mehrotar noted that address forms embody a crucial stage in face-
to-face interaction and represent a special aspect of relational language. He also
suggested that address forms not only serve as a bridge between individuals but
also a kind of ‘emotional capital’. Mehrotar further asserted that the differential
usage of address terms had been institutionalized as a means of defining and
affirming both the identities and statuses of the speaker and the addressee.

As earlier mentioned, a major interest shared among studies in this particular

phase is with regards to respect and intimacy, power and solidarity alongside other
social meanings of address forms. The earliest studies devoted to this interest
include Chatelain (1980), who discussed the use of the plural pronoun form in
Latin to express respect, Sohn (1981) with focus on power and solidarity in Korean,
Emihovich (1981), who examined intimacy in Bengali terms of address, and Ostör
(1982), who offered a wide range of aspects of meanings expressed in Hungarian
pronouns and terms of address, such as, formality/ informality, intimacy, and
city/ country term distinctions.

Among the most-cited and most influential studies focusing on the social usage of
address forms, particularly, politeness, solidarity, and distance, are Brown and
Levinson (1987), Koshal (1987), Braun (1988), Watts (1989), Fasold (1990), and
Wardhaugh (1992). Despite all their effort in trying to understand how speakers of
different languages manage to be polite with their options among terms in their
address system, Braun (1988) still found a lot to study about linguistic politeness.
She remarked (p.63),

As to the ambiguity of the term politeness, the question arises of

how the ambiguity can be solved. […] Moreover, polite forms
frequently express distance in addition to status, which is not
readily associated with the term.

and continued,

Imperfect knowledge of polite behavior moreover favors prejudices

and confirms certain people’s convictions that American s,
Germans, Turks, or any other group are coarse, or uneducated,
have no respect, and do not know how to behave. Even the
opposite prejudice is easily evoked.

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Showing a similar interest, Koshal (1987) and Watts (1989) argued that the notion
of politeness should be extended or enhanced as politic verbal behaviour, which is
socially universal, rather than being limited to personal attempt to avoid being
impolite (Watts 2005).

Kinship terms continued to gain interest during this phase of research literature.
Weller (1981:16) pointed out that traditional studies of these terms were commonly
treated as ‘purely referential categories’. Based on his analysis of Chinese kinship
terms, he argued that these terms have both pragmatic and referential meanings.
Similarly, Luong Hy V. (1984, p. 291) analysed the meanings of Vietnamese kinship
terms on the basis of rules that govern their ‘referential and non-referential uses’
and noted, “the full meanings of kinship terms can only be decoded on the basis of
the varied and functionally diverse relations between the linguistic forms and other
entities in the native universe” . In the same vein, Duranti (1984) explored the
social meaning of subject pronouns in Italian, and several years later, Cook (1999)
contributed his understanding in situational meanings of the use of the honorific
form and non-honorific form of address in Japanese.

The same decades (1980s – 1990s) also witnessed an increasing interest in different
aspects of address forms in various languages. For example, in their discussion of
uses of personal pronouns in French and English, in particular with the use of you,
we, and I for impersonal use, Kitagawa and Lehrer (1990) suggested that person
shifts are semantically and pragmatically natural. In the same light, Koul (1995),
by exploring Kashmiri language, pointed out that terms of address are determined
by such factors as social structure, cultural norms and geographical setting, and
that the selection of modes of address is influenced by different historical and
social factors as well. Similarly, on the grounds of the Hallidayan framework of
pronouns, Bala (1995) argued that the frequent use of pronouns in conversation by
Punjabi speakers is not only important grammatically, but deeply correlated with
the socio-psychological behaviour of users. This behaviour is reflected in those
pronouns, which are characterized by different shades of meaning, pertaining to
appropriate contexts and role relationships. From another angle, in his discussion
of proper names, Allerton (1996, p. 632) took into consideration the relationship
among the speaker-addressee-referent in the use of proper names, and asserted
that “choosing a mode of reference involves adopting a standpoint relative to other
persons, particularly the addressee”, and that “choosing a proper name […] can
amount to explicit marking of allegiance to a local socio-geographical group, while
choosing a simple definite noun phrase can amount to implicit marking of such
allegiance”. Also with special focus on sociolinguistic aspects, Mashiri (1999)
discussed the type of names that can be used among the Shona speech
communities of Zimbabwe, the contexts in which they are applied, their meanings,
and the circumstances of their creation. On his part, Dickey (1997) studied the
similarities and differences among German, English, and Vietnamese languages,
and the way in which referential and vocative usages are related.

It would be remiss not to mention the special interest that was shared among
grammarians and linguists who studied address forms of languages from syntactic,
morphological, and phonological perspectives, for example, the phenomenon of the
so-called Pro-drop, or zero anaphora. This linguistic phenomenon was to gain even
more attention in the next phase of research literature on address forms, and,
therefore, will be further discussed in the next section.

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4. More recent studies: the 2000s up to the present time

The turn of the millennium saw the emergence of more studies on sociolinguistic
and ethnographic approaches in relation to forms of address. In a study of Chinese
English, Zhang (2002) stresses the importance of address term studies and asserts
that terms of address are an important means to convey cultural messages,
especially with regards to the status and social relationships of the interlocutors.
Working on different aspects of other languages, but sharing the same view, are
Vietnamese (Nguyen, 2002), Western European languages (Clyne et al, 2003),
Indian Kannada (Manjulakshi, 2004), Gana (Afful, 2006), Australian English
(Rendle-Short, 2009), and more recently, Indonesian (Manns, 2012), Vietnamese
(Szymańska-Matusiewicz, 2012), Zimbabwean Ndebele (Ndhlovu, 2014), and
Persian (Allan & Salmani Nodoushan, 2015; Aliakbari & Toni 2008; Capone &
Salmani Nodoushan, 2014; Esmae’li, 2010; Keshavarz, 2001; Salmani Nodoushan,
2003; 2006a,b; 2007a,b; 2008; 2012; 2013; 2014; 2015; 2016; Salmani
Nodoushan & Allami, 2011).

On the same grounds, Wardhaugh (2006) also noted that people’s choices of terms
are governed by social factors, for instance, the context of communication, social
status, gender, age, family relationships, occupational hierarchy, transactional
status (for example, a doctor-patient or priest-penitent relationship), race, and the
degree of intimacy. Whereas, speakers of Persian in Iran can opt for personal
names, general and occupation titles, kinship related terms, religious oriented
expressions, honorifics, terms of intimacy among other forms of address when they
decide not to choose an address term (Aliakbari and Toni 2008). The researchers
concluded that Persian address terms are “gender sensitive, relatively formal and
culturally, socially and politically loaded” (2008: 11). Also, participants in Stivers
and Enfield and Levinson’s (2007, p. 19) studies “show a concern not only with
correctly identifying people and with providing information relevant to their
recipient but with navigating the relationships between themselves, their
addressee(s) and the referent(s),” and therefore, they suggested that “[p]erson
reference is one among many domains in language and interaction where we see
the inextricable integration of informational and affiliational concerns”. In other
words, as Ndhlovu (2014, p.177) stresses, “appropriate behaviour is socially
indexed in the interactional parties’s choices of personal pronominal address
forms”.

Continuing and extending the study of address forms as a means of conveying

social values such as solidarity and politeness, sociolinguists of this phase have
made great contributions. For example, Wardhaugh (2006: 260-283) devoted one
chapter in his book, An Introduction to Sociolinguistics (5Th edition), to the
discussion of solidarity and politeness mainly on the grounds of the former studies
of T/V usage in European languages by Brown and Gilman (1960), Friedrich
(1972), Bates and Benigni (1975), Lambert and Tucker (1976), Clyne (1984), Braun
(1988), Mühlhäusler and Harré (1990), and, as well as of studies in other
languages such as Nuer (Evans-Pritchard, 1948), Vietnamese (Luong, 1990),
Chinese (Scotton and Wanjin, 1983, Fang and Heng, 1983, and Ju, 1991),
Javanese (Geertz, 1960), and Japanese (Martin, 1964, Matsumoto, 1989, and Ide,
1989). In discussing the link between linguistic behaviour and politic behaviour,
Watts (2003) established new theories of politeness and politeness strategies.
Focusing on the use of terms of address such as T (title) and TLN (title + last name)
to express formality in the case of speakers of Swiss German, Watts raised a
question of politeness implication in the British culture with similar usage of T and

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TLN. Also from an angle of politic behaviour, Ndhlovu (2014) examines personal
pronouns in Ndebele, a language spoken in the Midlands and Matabeleland
provinces of Zimbabwe. Ndhlovu argued that personal pronouns lina (you plural)
and wena (you singular), when used as address terms, can lead to an ‘uneasy and
often unpredictable situation’ (p.176) because, beside age variation and gender
variation, there is a lack of clarity in terms of certain social factors such as, role-
relationships, level of intimacy, and degree of formality.

Other recent studies with a focus on expressing politeness, intimacy, power, and
solidarity through address form usage include those by Keshavarz (2001), Woolard
(2003), Stewart (2003), Nevala (2003), Ostermann (2003), Stewart (2001, 2003),
Benjamin and Afful (2006), Salifu’s (2010), Tran (2010), and Sidnell and Shohet
(2013), just to name a few among the many others.

Taking a cross-linguistic perspective, Enfield and Stivers (2007, p. 3) examined

person reference systems in different languages and cultures, as they are reflected
in everyday language use. The scholars argued that there is a close connection
between individuation and reference, and further noted that “Communication also
presupposes speakers and addressees in potentially different knowledge states […],
and with different relations to the referent, and thus introduce triangulation
between speaker, addressee and referent.”. This view was shared by the authors of
a comparative study of Chinese and American address terms conducted by Hao,
Zhang, and Zhu (2008, pp. 14-20). They suggested that the application of address
terms is governed by social norms and cultural rules. Address terms are
considered to be very important because they reflect the user’s attitude, and also
the interpretation of the relationship between the people involved in
communication. Based on their analysis of the data, the researchers concluded
that “inappropriate choice of address terms hinders effective communication
between the speaker and the addressee”. From her own experience as a Polish
native speaker, anthropologist Szymańska-Matusiewicz (2014, pp. 95-111) says
“the Vietnamese pronominal reference system is an example of an extremely
complex address system, significantly different from systems present in Indo-
European languages.”

As earlier mentioned in Section 3, the linguistic phenomenon of Pro-drop, or zero

anaphora, is well-documented and has gained attention from numerous
researchers of different generations. The phenomenon is of special interest to
grammarians and linguists of functional grammar, who have been attempting to
explain it using various theories and frameworks, such as, a pro-drop parameter-
setting framework (Chomsky, 1981), Principle of Lexicalization (Bouchard, 1983),
Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky, 1993), Morphological Uniformity
Hypothesis (Jaeggli and Safir, 1989), Minimalist Program (Chomsky, 1995), and
Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky, 1993). It is, however, assumed that
further discussion of the phenomenon from the perspective of functional grammar
is unnecessary and inappropriate to the purpose of this paper. Rather, what is of
greater importance is to understand how this linguistic phenomenon has been
explored from a pragmatic aspect, for example, from a cultural view point, although
the fact is that very little has been done yet along these lines. One of the languages
in which zero anaphora, or ellipsis of referents is found to be very popular is
Japanese. Nariyama (2003, p. 34), among others, asserts that there are some
aspects of Japanese culture that are of relevance to the use of ellipsis. In her
words, “These aspects suggest that Japanese culture values subtlety, hence
indirectness, in language expressions, and this may be one of the factors that

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motivate the frequent use of ellipsis”. Subject ellipsis in English is also a topic of
concern when it is analysed by looking at various resources such as diary registers
(Haegeman and Ihsane, 1999) and online weblogs (Teddiman and Newman, 2007).
In other cases, the topic of ellipsis, or argument drop, is discussed as a referential
choice governed by discourse-pragmatic principles, and is a natural process in
language acquisition. Among the studies with this interest are Hirakawa (1983),
Nakayama (1994), and Guerriero et al. (2006) working on Japanese, Clancy (1993,
1997), and Kim (2000) on Korean, Bloom (1990, 1993), Valian (1991) on American
English and Italian, Hyams & Wexler (1993), and Guerriero et al. (2006) on
English, and O’Grady et al. (2008) on Japanese and Korean, and Mishina-Mori
(2013) Japanese.

Another important area in address research that is not very much touched on in
the previous literature is translation. The dearth of address research literature with
a focus on translation should not be construed as signalling that the translation
aspect is less important than other areas that have been widely explored. Each
language has its own system of address forms, ranging from a rather simple one
like English with no linguistic marks on age or solidarity, to very complicated ones
like those of some Southeast Asian languages. Just putting aside the other
semantic and pragmatic meanings related to the situation and other social factors
that affect the use of address forms, their literal meaning can pose challenges when
compared across languages. For example, according to Braun (1988), the literal
meaning of personal pronouns of address, is sometimes unlikely to be identifiable.
Some pronouns of address, such as the English he, she, and they, can be analysed
into semantic features, such as ‘singular/ plural’, ‘male/ female’; whereas, such a
pronoun as you does not include those features. Unlike the English second-person
pronoun you, which has one form, in Korean, there are three different second-
person pronouns, which are different in referential meanings: nø - used among
peers and younger people, tangsin –used to express politeness, and jane to refer to
younger people (Hwang 1991). Thus, the semantic features of Korean second-
person pronouns include ‘age’ and ‘intimacy/ politeness.’ A lack of distinction
between formal and intimate address in English, consequently, may lead to
difficulties when this distinction in other languages has to be rendered in English.

Therefore, equivalence in translations among languages in regard to terms of

address in many cases seems to be non-existent, also because, equivalence is a
relative concept itself. In the words of House (2006, 344),

Equivalence is a relative concept in several respects; it is determined

by the socio-historical conditions in which the translation act is
embedded, and by the range of often irreconcilable linguistic and
contextual factors at play, among them at least the following: source
and target languages with their specific structural constraints; the
extra-linguistic world and the way this world is perceived by the two
language communities; the linguistic conventions of the translator
and of the target language and culture; structural, connotative and
aesthetic features of the original; the translator’s comprehension and
interpretation of the original and her creativity; the translator’s
explicit and/or implicit theory of translation; translation traditions in
the target culture; interpretation of the original by its author;
audience design as well as generic norms, and possibly many more.

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Nevertheless, attempts have been made by a few enthusiastic researchers across

different languages with discussions related to translation of address terms. For
example, Methven (2006) and Yang (2010) studied Chinese and English, Nguyen,
P.V.C (2003) and Ngo (2006) focused on Vietnamese and English, and Lotfollahi
and Dabbaghi (2012) worked on English to Persian. Konthong (2012) was
interested in two popular approaches of translation, namely, foreignization and
domestication applied in the translation of Thai address terms to express emotions.
Among the most recent studies is Ethelb’s (2015), who explored the translation of
address terms in showing politeness from Arabic into English. Nevertheless, the
field of address research is still yet to be exhaustively explored with regards to
translation in order to help in bridging gaps in mutual understanding across
different cultures.

5. Further discussion and conclusion

There has been an enormous amount of interest in research on personal address

forms, particularly in the field of sociolinguistics. Across all three generations of
scholars reviewed in this paper, studies of address systems have significantly
contributed to the insight into different languages, varying from the most-spoken
ones to uncommon ones. The studies reviewed in the paper explored various
aspects of personal address forms, not only on linguistic grounds but also on the
grounds of social and cultural concerns.

As indicated in this review, the study of personal address forms started as early as
the eighteenth century, but then got neglected until it picked up again in the early
twentieth century. Fortunately, researchers’ interest in this topic has never
declined since, with increasing attention from the mid-1950s until the present
time. The paper showed that important studies in this field during the early phase
of literature, between the mid-1950s and 1970s, focused on various aspects of
address terms such as their social, situational, and contextual meanings.
Researchers of this generation devoted enormous effort in exploring the
relationships between a language feature such as a system of address and its social
and cultural values, for instance, social status, intimacy, and solidarity. Also in
this phase of address research numerous studies started with various aspects of
kinship terms as an important part of address.

The next generation of researchers from the 1970s to the 1990s contributed to
further insight on address forms with regards to politeness and politic behaviour.
Also, some studies in this category were concerned with the different uses of
personal pronouns in languages, and how different forms of address and referent
are used in different contexts, for example, in educational settings or familial
settings. A wide range of languages, varying from European to African, Oceanic,
and Asian languages, were taken into account. In terms of approaches, not only
sociolinguistics was of concern, but also were other approaches such as
anthropology, (linguistic) ethnology, and language acquisition.

More aspects of address forms have gained the attention of the younger generation
of researchers, including those who explore specific features of address forms such
as the pronoun drop, and translation. This is in addition tothose who continue
working on different social contexts where address terms are used differently, and
on certain norms of discourse, for example, diaries.

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 Linguistics Archives 2016

Nevertheless, beside the significant contributions that have been identified in the
address research literature reviewed in this paper, there still remain some
remarkable gaps in the body of literature. One of the omissions in studies of
address terms is the translation of these terms across languages. As already
discussed, due to the different levels of complexity among systems of address, there
should be certain strategies in translations that help solve the problems of non-
equivalence. More theoretical contribution from translators as well as empirical
studies conducted by researchers of, for example, applied linguistics may provide a
better insight and practical material in this area.

Another aspect that deserves further attention is the pragmatic aspect of the
omissions or ellipses of address terms. Although the phenomenon of zero-
anaphora, or Pro-drop, as discussed in Section 4, has gained profound interest
from grammarians and functional linguists, there is still a dearth of literature in
regards to its pragmatic concerns. In certain languages such as Japanese and
Vietnamese, ellipsis of pronouns and other address terms has its own voice. For
example, in Japanese, it is a cultural feature, and in Vietnamese, it can be
considered as an official form of address in casual conversations or to be employed
by people of higher or equal social status to others. This pragmatic aspect of
address forms, therefore, constitutes a yawning gap that deserves attention in
future research.

In conclusion, as long as languages and their social and cultural values are still of
concern, studies of personal address forms will be of great interest. As widely
acknowledged by the literature reviewed in this paper, address systems are a vital
key to the understanding of people’s language as well as cultural and social beliefs
and practices. It is hoped that this paper has provided a comprehensive history of
address research and laid out important sign posts for future research in this field.

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