Abstract
The article investigates forms of address and request behaviour in Serbian as compared to German. It is based on an empirical study with authentic speech data and a survey among na-tive speakers of the two languages. While the corpora of authentic speech data document mainly service encounters and other minimal everyday interactions, the survey aims at reveal-ing the judgements and attitudes of native speakers towards different request strategies. The results point towards the well-known distinction between "solidarity cultures" in the East and "distance cultures" in the West. However, such findings must be treated with caution as other factors seem to influence the range of strategies available in the two languages as well.
Highlights
The article investigates forms of address and request behaviour in Serbian as compared to German
It is important here that the speech events gathered by means of participant observation were at risk of being flawed by my non-native competence of Serbian
Both data bases consist of comparable situations, the extra-linguistic contexts are not always identical
Summary
Familiar address is expressed by an ordinary second person pronoun in the singular This distribution is well-founded, "for plurality is a very old and ubiquitous metaphor for power" (Brown/Gilman 1960: 255). Forms of address in the plural indicate (mutual) respect or unfamiliarity rather than the asymmetric power relations which created such address forms in the first place Both Serbian and German feature a binary pronominal system. In the 17th century, third person honorifics were introduced (in both singular and plural) and three forms of formal address coexisted until honorific Sie eliminated the others.. Research on forms of address usually distinguishes between nominal and pronominal address This dichotomy will serve our purposes for the analysis of Serbian and German speech data in the two sections.
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