Addressing non-acquaintances in Tunisian Arabic: A cognitive-pragmatic account

Abstract

The literature on terms of address (TofA) abounds in both sociolinguistics and pragmatics. Mostly, sociolinguistics explains them with rank and age (Trudgill, Sociolinguistics: An introduction to language and society, Penguin Books, 1983; Wardhaugh, An introduction to sociolinguistics, Basil Blackwell, 1986; Fasold, The sociolinguistics of language, Blackwell Publishers, 1990; Holmes, Introduction to sociolinguistics, Longman, 1992; Romaine, Language in society: An introduction to sociolinguistics, Oxford University Press, 1994) and pragmatics with politeness (Brown and Levinson, Politeness: Some universals in language use, Cambridge University Press, 1987). Furthermore, TofA are mostly studied as occurring between acquaintances that know about the social rank and age of each other to produce the address that is most coherent with the context of situation. The present study focuses on TofA used in addressing non-acquaintances, i.e., people who have never met one another before. Evidence from Tunisian Arabic (TA) shows that TofA as used with non-acquaintances are not motivated by rank and politeness as much as by the addresser's drive to create familiarity and minimize distance with the addressee. Such a pragmatic minimization of distance is not noticed when TofA are used with acquaintances. Speakers of TA inject kinship-related terms in their address to non-acquaintances in view of creating rapprochement between the speaker as a deictic center and the addressee in the periphery. Such a rapprochement is made possible through the manipulation by the speaker of the FAR-NEAR schema (Johnson, The body in the mind: The bodily basis of meaning, imagination, and reason, The University of Chicago Press, 1987) related to the CENTER-PERIPHERY image schema. The paper intends to show this taming of addressees by studying TofA in TA through Lakoff's (Categories: An essay in cognitive linguistics, Hanshin Publishing Company, 1982, Women, fire, and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind, The University of Chicago Press, 1987) theory of categorization known as Idealized Cognitive Models (ICMs).