The Cultural Semantics of Forms of Address: A Contrastive Study Between English and Italian

Abstract

This study analyses forms of address from both a semantic and cultural point of view with a twofold aim: (i) to show that forms of address express a proper meaning which can be clearly pinpointed with a suitable methodology; (ii) to highlight the differences in address practices of different linguacultures and their implications for cross-cultural communication. The approach taken is that of cultural semantics, the branch of linguistics which investigates the relationship between meaning and culture. Combining semantics and cultural studies, cultural semantics is closely related to various sub-branches of linguistics, most importantly cross-cultural communication, intercultural pragmatics and translation theory. Researchers in cultural semantics adopt the methodology of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage created by Anna Wierzbicka and Cliff Goddard and developed in collaboration with numerous academics from around the world. Over decades of cross-linguistic research, NSM has proved itself an optimal methodology to investigate the meanings of words in cross-linguistic perspective, in particular emotion words, cultural keywords and more recently musical terms. The analysis of forms of address is a new application of NSM, and in this case, too, the methodology has proved itself the ideal tool for this purpose. To the best of my knowledge, never before in address research has a scholar done an extended study of the meanings of address expressions and the set of cultural values which guide address practices in a linguacultural world. In line with NSM researchers, the premise to this study is that to pinpoint the meaning of various address expressions and capture the cultural assumptions underlying address practices in English and Italian, it is necessary to produce definitions which are comparable. This permits to highlight the differences between the two linguacultures clearly and to provide language learners and culture outsiders with optimal tools which they can use for cross-cultural training. Although the present study is not written in the form of textbook, being based on NSM it is of considerable pedagogical use. This study is aimed at a very wide readership which includes not only scholars in linguistics, but anyone interested in issues in intercultural communication. In Chapter 1 of the thesis, I review the main studies on address with particular attention to those which are most pertinent to my analysis. In Chapter 2, I introduce the methodology of semantic analysis which I adopted and present my body data. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the “greetings” Hi and Ciao. In chapters 5 and 6 I analyse nouns used to address people in English and Italian. Chapters 7 to 10 are dedicated to the analysis of the meaning of opening and closing salutations in letters and e-mails and finally, Chapters 11 to 13 focus on cultural scripts and the implications of differences in address practices for intercultural interactions. Show more