Abstract
Abstract This paper explores the pragmatic scope of the endearment ‘love’ in contemporary spoken British English. It will be suggested that the function of ‘love’ in interaction can be understood as a ritual framing expression that enables speakers to index certain interpersonal constellations and action contexts in which speakers claim rights and social authority by couching them in affective stance displays. The study is based on the 1994 and 2014 versions of the British National Corpus. The findings show that over the course of twenty years, the use of ‘love’ has become significantly less frequent and has undergone a functional profile shift to index, more centrally than before, other-deprecating evaluation, enacted through joking and performative use in storytelling. Those functions appear to feed off the core semantics and interpersonal constellations of ‘love’ as well as associations with social and linguistic stereotypes.
Highlights
This paper aims to explore the pragmatic scope of the endearment ‘love’ in contemporary British English
Baumgarten in spoken interaction can be understood as a ritual frame indicating expression (RFIE) (Kádár and House, 2020) that enables speakers to index certain interpersonal constellations and action contexts (Levinson, 2013) in which speakers claim rights and social authority by couching them in affective stance displays
In ritual communicative contexts (‘standard situations’, Kádár and House, 2020), i.e. contexts in which specific behavioural rules apply and participants’ rights and obligations are clearly defined, RFIEs, such as politeness markers (e.g. ‘please’) or honorifics, are used to mark that the interaction is to be understood as de-individualised. They are used to index the situation and a contingent participant role relationship rather than being an expression of specific, ad-hoc interpersonal meaning between speaker and addressee. On this view, ‘love’ as a RFIE would index a ritual frame for the business at hand for the addressee that includes a routine expression of an affective stance towards the addressee, which is verbalised because it is conventionally linked to the particular social identity or role claimed by the speaker in the situation (Ochs, 1996), and not necessarily because it corresponds to an actual affective relation between speaker and addressee as individuals
Summary
This paper aims to explore the pragmatic scope of the endearment ‘love’ in contemporary British English. ‘please’) or honorifics, are used to mark that the interaction is to be understood as de-individualised That is, they are used to index the situation and a contingent participant role relationship rather than being an expression of specific, ad-hoc interpersonal meaning between speaker and addressee. They are used to index the situation and a contingent participant role relationship rather than being an expression of specific, ad-hoc interpersonal meaning between speaker and addressee On this view, ‘love’ as a RFIE would index a ritual frame for the business at hand for the addressee (and other co-participants and overhearers) that includes a routine expression of an affective stance towards the addressee, which is verbalised because it is conventionally linked to the particular social identity or role claimed by the speaker in the situation (Ochs, 1996), and not necessarily because it corresponds to an actual affective relation between speaker and addressee as individuals. The analysis contributes to a better understanding of the meaning potential and interactional uses of ‘love’, and why it can be both claimed as a regional maker of friendly relations and ingroup identity (Beal, 2004; Wales, 2006) and contested as a term that can be used offensively (e.g. Dunkling, 1990; Poynton, 1990)
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