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

307 Pages·2018·1.86 MB·English

by  Gian Marco Farese

The Cultural Semantics
of Address Practices

The Cultural Semantics
of Address Practices
A Contrastive Study
between English and Italian
Gian Marco Farese
LEXINGTON BOOKS
Lanham • Boulder • New York • London
Published by Lexington Books
An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
www.rowman.com
Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB
Copyright © 2018 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems,
without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote
passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
LCCN 2018945968 | ISBN 9781498579278 (hardback : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781498579285 (electronic)
∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
1 Analyzing Address Practices from a Cultural Semantic
Point of View 1
2 “Sorry Boss”: An Unrecognized Category of English
Address Nouns 41
3 “Prego, Signore”: The Semantics of Italian “Titles”
Used to Address People 53
4 “Hi, How Are You?” 101
5 Ciao! or Ciao Ciao? 109
6 “Dear Customers, …” 125
7 Caro Mario, Gentile Cliente, Egregio Dottore 137
8 Best Wishes, Kind Regards, Yours Sincerely 155
9 Distinti, Cordiali, Affettuosi Saluti 189
10 Italian Cultural Scripts for Address Practices 225
11 Australian Cultural Scripts for Address Practices 261
12 Address Practices in Intercultural Communication 279
Bibliography 285
Index 293
About the Author 297
v

Acknowledgments
This book is the result of an extensive intercultural research project which
has involved numerous people from two different continents and from vari-
ous institutions. The study would not have been possible without the invalu-
able collaboration of students and colleagues in Italy and Australia, to whom
I express all my deepest gratitude.
I wish to acknowledge the contribution of all the Italian, British, and
Australian friends who kindly participated in the surveys which I conducted
for this study. I must also acknowledge the contribution and stimulus which
I received from all the people who joined the Seminar on Semantics convened
by Anna Wierzbicka at the Australian National University.
Special thanks to Anna De Meo for her invaluable help in collecting the
data for the analysis, to Zhengdao Ye for her expertise, availability, and con-
stant support, to Cliff Goddard for his precious advice and suggestions, and
most of all to Anna Wierzbicka for her guidance, for her enlightening genius,
and for being an inexhaustible source of inspiration.
Finally, thanks to the people at Lexington Books for believing in this proj-
ect and to my family, from the deep of my heart.
Gian Marco
vii

Chapter 1
Analyzing Address Practices from a
Cultural Semantic Point of View
UNDERSTANDING ADDRESS PRACTICES
The terms address and address practice indicate the linguistic practice of
using specific words to call or identify someone and signal that this person
is the intended recipient of a message. Address practices are performed in
interactions in which at least two people are involved and can communicate:
a speaker and an addressee. It is the speaker who assigns the respective roles
to the participants in the communicative event when addressing the inter-
locutor; the addressee, on their part, understands their role of recipient of the
message by decodifying the words used by the speaker. When addressing one
or more people, speakers always perform an act of saying; the interaction
involves a first person I who says something to a second person you, singular
or plural if more participants are involved. While there can be non-verbal
communication (e.g., gestures, facial expressions, signs) and non-verbal
cues (e.g., posture, hugs, kisses, bows), there exists no “non-verbal address.”
For this reason, address practices are included in the overarching category
of speech acts.
Address practices can be part of both oral and written/digital interactions
and can be performed in different ways, the variation depending on a number
of different factors including the following: (i) individual speakers’ choices
and preferences; (ii) the context of interaction; (iii) the relationship between
the speaker and the addressee; (iv) the repertoire of words available in a lan-
guage as ways of addressing people; and (v) cultural values and assumptions
guiding discourse. Consequently, the same person can be addressed in differ-
ent ways by different speakers depending on the situational context.
Address is a very important and very frequent practice of everyday dis-
course in many linguacultures. Numerous times in one day people all over the
1