“What's in a Name?”: Vocatives in Casual Conversations and Radio Phone-in Calls

Abstract

This paper looks at the use of vocatives across two corpora: the 5-million word Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus of Discourse in English (CANCODE) and a 55,000-word corpus of radio phone-in calls. 100 vocatives are sampled from the CANCODE corpus, using only informal, casual conversations among intimates, friends and close associates. All vocatives (n=232) were extracted from the radio data. The vocatives in both datasets were classified according to the contexts in which they occurred. The contexts were categorised under headings connected with topic and turn management, face concerns, general relational concerns, humour/badinage and summons. The distribution over the two datasets was compared, as well as the position of the vocative in the speaker turn. Overall, the CANCODE data revealed a preference for vocatives in relational, topic management, badinage and face-concerns, while the radio data revealed a tendency for vocatives to be used more in the management of phone calls, turn-taking, topic management and face concerns. The radio data showed a greater frequency for initial position, then final, while the casual conversation data was the reverse. Medial position was seen to be problematic in both datasets and an alternative analysis is proposed. In neither dataset did vocatives seem to be necessary except in a small number of cases. Overwhelmingly, the vocative serves pragmatic functions. Comparing linguistic features such as the vocative across datasets enhances the descriptive framework for spoken genres.

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