The paper explores the use of vocatives in a corpus of 24 American and British films (the Pavia Corpus of Film Dialogue) by comparing film dialogue with spontaneous speech. A systematic quantitative and qualitative analysis of empirical data is provided to assess how address forms used by English speakers in natural verbal exchanges are reproduced on screen, and to identify patterns of address that can be regarded as distinctive of film dialogue. The findings show a higher frequency of vocatives in film dialogue, which serve diegetic and extradiegetic functions. From a qualitative point of view, filmic speech effectively reproduces interpersonal functions and sociolinguistic variation associated with vocatives in spontaneous interactions; on the other hand, it is characterized by a sophisticated use of address strategies accounted for in terms of authorial expressivity.
Agha, Asif. 1994. Honorification. Annual Review of Anthropology 231: 277–302.
Allerton, D.J. 1996. Proper names and definite descriptions with the same reference: A pragmatic choice for language users. Journal of Pragmatics 25 (5): 621–633.
Alvarez-Pereyre, Michael. 2011. Using film as linguistic specimen: Theoretical and practical issues. In Telecinematic Discourse: Approaches to the Language of Films and Television Series, Roberta Piazza, Monika Bednarek and Fabio Rossi (eds.). Amsterdam and Philadelphia:John Benjamins, 47–67.
Aston, Guy and Lou Burnard. 1998. The BNC Handbook: Exploring the British National Corpus with SARA. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Azzaro, Gabriele. 2005. Four-Letter Films: Taboo Language in Movies. Roma: Aracne.
Bargiela, Francesca, Corinne Boz, Lily Gokzadze, Abdurrahman Hamza, Sara Mills and Nino Rukhadze. 2002. Ethnocentrism, politeness and naming strategies. Working Papers on the Web 3. URL [URL](Last accessed on 7 February 2013).
Bednarek, Monika. 2011a. The stability of the televisual character: A corpus stylistic case study. In Telecinematic Discourse: Approaches to the Language of Films and Television Series,Roberta Piazza, Monika Bednarek and Fabio Rossi (eds.). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 185–204.
Bednarek, Monika. 2011b. Expressivity and televisual characterization. Language and Literature 20 (1): 3–21.
Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad and Edward Finegan. 1999. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Pearson.
Braun, Frederike. 1988. Terms of Address: Problems of Patterns and Usage in Various Languages and Cultures. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Brown, Penelope and Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brown, Roger and Marguerite Ford. 1961. Address in American English. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 62 (2): 375–385.
Bruti, Silvia and Elisa Perego. 2008. Vocatives in subtitles: A survey across genres. In Ecolingua: The Role of E-Corpora in Translation and Language Learning, Christopher Taylor (ed.). Trieste: EUT, 11–51.
Bruti, Silvia and Elisa Perego. 2010. Audiovisual genre and the translation of vocatives in interlingual subtitles. In Perspectives on Audiovisual Translation, Łukasz Bogucki and Krzysztof Kredens (eds.). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 61–75.
Bruti, Silvia and Serenella Zanotti. 2012. Orality markers in professional and amateur subtitling: The case of vocatives and address pronouns. In Film Translation from East to West: Dubbing, Subtitling and Didactic Practice, Claudia Buffagni and Beatrice Garzelli (eds.). Bern: Peter Lang, 167–193.
Bubel, Claudia M. 2006. The linguistic construction of character relations in TV drama: Doing friendship in Sex and the City. Ph.D. dissertation, Universität des Saarlandes.
Bubel, Claudia M. 2008. Film audiences as overhearers. Journal of Pragmatics 40 (1): 55–71.
Bucholtz, Mary. 2011. Race and the re-embodied voice in Hollywood film. Language and Communication 31 (3): 255–265.
Bucholtz, Mary and Qiuana Lopez. 2011. Performing blackness, forming whiteness: Linguistic minstrelsy in Hollywood film. Journal of Sociolinguistics 15 (5): 680–706.
Carney, Ray and Leonard Quart. 2000. The Films of Mike Leigh: Embracing the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Clayman, Steven E. 2010. Address terms in the service of other actions: The case of news interview talk. Discourse and Communication 4 (2): 161–183.
Clyne, Michael, Catrin Norrby and Jane Warren. 2009. Language and Human Relations: Styles of Address in Contemporary Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dunkling, Leslie. 1990. A Dictionary of Epithets and Terms of Address. London and New York: Routledge.
Forchini, Pierfranca. 2012. Movie Language Revisited: Evidence from Multi-Dimensional Analysis and Corpora. Bern: Peter Lang.
Formentelli, Maicol. 2007. The vocative mate in contemporary English: A corpus-based study. In Language Resources and Linguistic Theory, Andrea Sansò (ed.). Milano: Franco Angeli, 180–199.
Freddi, Maria and Maria Pavesi. 2009. The Pavia Corpus of Film Dialogue: Research rationale and methodology. In Analysing Audiovisual Dialogue: Linguistic and Translational Insights, Maria Freddi and Maria Pavesi (eds.). Bologna: CLUEB, 95–100.
Freddi, Maria and Maria Pavesi. 2011. Further insights into corpora and AVT: Developing a corpus of film dialogue. Paper presented at the 4th International Media for All Conference “Audiovisual Translation: Taking Stock”, London, 28 June-1 July 2011.
Goodwin, Marjorie Harness. 1990. He-Said-She-Said: Talk as Social Organization among Black Children. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Gramley, Stephan and Kurt-Michael Pätzold. 2004. A Survey of Modern English. London and New York: Routledge.
Gregory, Michael and Suzanne Carroll. 1978. Language and Situation: Language Varieties and their Social Contexts. London and New York: Routledge.
Guillot, Marie-Noelle. 2010. Film subtitles from a cross-cultural pragmatics perspective: Issues of linguistic and cultural representations. The Translator 16 (1): 67–92.
Heyd, Theresa. 2010. How you guys doin’? Staged orality and emerging plural address in the television series Friends. American Speech 85 (1): 33–66.
Holmes, Janet. 2001. An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. London: Longman.
Jaworski, Adam and Dariusz Galasiński. 2000. Vocative address forms and ideological legitimisation in political debates. Discourse Studies 2 (1): 65–83.
Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Catherine. 2008. Le fonctionnement des termes d’adresse dans certaines situations de parole publique (petits commerces, débats médiatiques). In Atti del 70 Congresso dell’Associazione Italiana di Linguistica Applicata [AitLA], Cristina Bosisio, Bona Cambiagli, Emanuela Piemontese and Francesca Santulli (eds.). Perugia, Italy: Guerra Edizioni, 67–88.
Kiesling, Scott F. 2004. Dude. American Speech 79 (3): 281–305.
Kozloff, Sarah. 2000. Overhearing Film Dialogue. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Leech, Geoffrey. 1999. The distribution and function of vocatives in American and British English conversation. In Out of Corpora: Studies in Honour of Stig Johansson,Hilde Hasselgård and Signe Oksefjell (eds.). Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 107–118.
McCarthy, Michael J. and Anne O’Keeffe. 2003. “What’s in a name?”: Vocatives in casual conversation and radio phone-in calls. In Corpus Analysis: Language Structure and Language Use,Pepi Leistyna and Charles F. Meyer (eds.). Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 153–185.
McConnell-Ginet, Sally. 2003. “What’s in a name?”: Social labelling and gender practices. In The Handbook of Language and Gender,Janet Holmes and Miriam Meyerhoff (eds.). Oxford: Blackwell, 69–97.
Murray, Thomas E. 2002. A new look at address in American English: The rules have changed. Names 50 (1): 43–61.
Norrick, Neal R. and Claudia Bubel. 2009. Direct address as a resource of humor. In Humor in Interaction, Neal R. Norrick and Delia Chiaro (eds.). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 29–47.
Oakes, Michael P. 1998. Statistics for Corpus Linguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Palma-Fahey, María. 2011. Exploring the representation of orality: The use of vocatives in two Spanish-speaking films, Machuca and Volver. Sociolinguistic Studies 5 (1): 103–126.
Pavesi, Maria. 1996. L’allocuzione nel doppiaggio dall’inglese all’italiano. In Traduzione multimediale per il cinema, la televisione e la scena, Christine Heiss and Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli (eds.). Bologna: CLUEB, 117–130.
Pavesi, Maria. 2005. La traduzione filmica: Aspetti del parlato doppiato dall’inglese all’italiano. Roma: Carocci.
Pavesi, Maria. 2012. The enriching functions of address shift in film translation. In Audiovisual Translation and Media Accessibility at the Crossroads, Aline Remael, Pilar Orero and Mary Carroll (eds.). Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 335–356.
Poynton, Cate. 1984. Names as vocatives: Forms and functions. Nottingham Linguistics Circular 131: 1–34.
Poynton, Cate. 1989a. Terms of address in Australian English. In Australian English: The Language of a New Society, Peter Collins and David Blair (eds.). St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 55–69.
Poynton, Cate. 1989b. Language and Gender: Making the Difference. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rendle-Short, Johanna. 2007. “Catherine, you’re wasting your time”: Address terms within the Australian political interview. Journal of Pragmatics 39 (9): 1503–1525.
Rendle-Short, Johanna. 2009. The address term mate in Australian English: Is it still a masculine term? Australian Journal of Linguistics 19 (2): 245–268.
Rodríguez Martín, María Elena. 2010. Comparing parts of speech and semantic domains in the BNC and a micro-corpus of movies: Is film language the ‘real thing’? In Corpus Linguistics in Language Teaching, Tony Harris and María Moreno Jaén (eds.). Bern: Peter Lang, 147–175.
Rodríguez Martín, María Elena and María Moreno Jaén. 2009. Teaching conversation through films: A comparison of conversational features and collocations in the BNC and a micro-corpus of movies. The International Journal of Learning 16 (7): 445–458.
Rossi, Fabio. 1999. Le parole dello schermo: Analisi linguistica del parlato di sei film dal 1948 al 1957. Roma: Bulzoni.
Rühlemann, Christoph. 2007. Conversation in Context: A Corpus-Driven Approach. London: Continuum.
Sutton, Laurel A. 1995. Bitches and skankly hobags: The place of women in contemporary slang. In Gender Articulated: Language and the Socially Constructed Self, Kira Hall and Mary Bucholtz (eds.). London and New York: Routledge, 279–296.
Szarkowska, Agnieszka. 2010. Why are some vocatives not omitted in subtitling? A study based on three selected Polish soaps broadcast on TV Polonia. In Perspectives on Audiovisual Translation, Łukasz Bogucki and Krzysztof Kredens (eds.). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 77–92.
Taylor, Christopher. 1999. Look who’s talking: An analysis of film dialogue as a variety of spoken discourse. In Massed Medias: Linguistic Tools for Interpreting Media Discourse, Linda Lombardo, Louann Haarman, John Morley and Christopher Taylor (eds.). Milano: LED Edizioni Universitarie, 247–278.
Wales, Katie. 1996. Personal Pronouns in Present-Day English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Weatherall, Ann. 1996. Language about women and men: An example from popular culture. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 15 (1): 59–75.
Wolfson, Nessa and Joan Manes. 1980. Don’t ‘dear’ me! In Women and Language in Literature and Society, Sally McConnell-Ginet, Ruth Borker and Nelly Furman (eds.). New York: Praeger Publishers, 79–92.
Zago, Raffaele. 2011. The pragmatic functions of vocatives in a corpus of British and American films.Poster presented at the
12th International Pragmatics Conference
, Manchester, 3–8 July 2011.
Zwicky, Arnold M. 1974. “Hey, Whatsyourname!”. In Papers from the Tenth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, Michael W. La Galy, Robert A. Fox and Anthony Bruck (eds.). Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society, 787–801.
Cited by (14)
Cited by 14 other publications
Flesch, Marie
2023. “Dude” and “Dudette”, “Bro” and “Sis”: A Diachronic Study of Four Address Terms in the TV Corpus. Anglica. An International Journal of English Studies :32/2 ► pp. 23 ff.
Galiano, Liviana & Alfonso Semeraro
2023. Part-of-Speech and Pragmatic Tagging of a Corpus of Film Dialogue: A Pilot Study. Corpus Pragmatics 7:1 ► pp. 17 ff.
Palacios Martínez, Ignacio M.
2023. A syntactic and pragmatic study of nominal vocatives in the Twitter exchanges of rappers’ fans. Journal of Pragmatics 207 ► pp. 93 ff.
Bączkowska, Anna
2022. Forms of Address in Polish Nonprofessional Subtitles. In Language Use, Education, and Professional Contexts [Second Language Learning and Teaching, ], ► pp. 71 ff.
2022. The pragmatic functions of tu and lei in films: Converging patterns of address across translated and original Italian dialogue. Journal of Pragmatics 201 ► pp. 15 ff.
Minutella, Vincenza
2021. Americans, Brits, Aussies, Etc.: Native Varieties of English in Italian Dubbing. In (Re)Creating Language Identities in Animated Films, ► pp. 217 ff.
Ghia, Elisa
2019. (Dis)aligning across different linguacultures: Pragmatic questions from original to dubbed film dialogue
. Multilingua 38:5 ► pp. 583 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 2 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.