The Impacts of Level of Education and Economic Status on the Choice of Address Terms by Young Couples
الموضوعات : Research in English Language Pedagogy
Sajad Shafiee
1
(Department of English, Shahrekord Branch, Islamic Azad University, Shahrekord, Iran)
Amir Sabzevari
2
(Department of English, Shahrekord Branch, Islamic Azad University, Shahrekord, Iran)
Nooshafarin Motallebi
3
(Department of English, Najafabad Branch, Islamic Azad University, Najafabad, Isfahan, Iran)
الکلمات المفتاحية: Address Terms, level of education, Economic Status, Sociolinguistic Investigation,
ملخص المقالة :
This study aimed to investigate the effects of economic status and level of education on the choice of address terms by Iranian couples in Shahrekord, Iran. To this end, 50 couples were selected, based on their educational and economic statuses, and were studied in terms of their choice of address terms. A discourse completion task was used as the data elicitation technique and Chi-square was conducted to analyze the data. The results of this study unveiled the patterns of realizations of terms of address among the couples in different situations. It was found that level of education (though not economic status) was an important factor in the choice of address terms among couples. Unsurprisingly, the more educated the participants, the more formal address terms they used. Indeed, level of education brought about significant differences among the low, mid, and high level of education couples in the address termed they chose to use. It was also divulged that there was no significant difference in using terms of address for couples with low and high economic status.
References
Braun, F. (1988).Terms of address. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Brown, P. & Levinson, S. C. (1987).Politeness: Some universals of language use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brown, R. & Ford, M. (1961). Address in American English. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 62, 375-385.
Brown, R. & Gilman, A. (1960).The pronouns of power and solidarity. In T.A. Sebeok,
(Ed.), Style in language, (pp. 253-276). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Ervin-Tripp, S.M., (1972). Sociolinguistic rules of address. In J.B. Pride, & J. Holmes,
(Eds.), Sociolinguistics: Selected readings, (pp. 225–240). Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books.
Fasold, R. (1984). The sociolinguistics of society. Oxford: Blackwell.
Fasold, R. (1990). The sociolinguistics of language. Oxford: Blackwell.
Friedrich, P. (1972). Social context and semantic feature: The Russian pronominal
usage. In J J. Gumperz, & D. Hymes (Eds.), Directions in sociolinguistics: The ethnography of communication, (pp. 270-300). Basil Blackwell: New York.
Hymes, D. (1972). On communication competence. In J.B. Pride, & J. Holmes, (Eds.), Sociolinguistic: Selected Readings, (pp. 81-102). Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books.
Keshavarz, M. H. (2001). The role of social context, intimacy, and distance in the choice of forms of address.International Journal of Sociology of Language 14(8), 5–18.
Lyons, J. (1977). Semantics. London: Cambridge University Press.
Liu, Y. (2006). The urban code and the rural code of stall-holders.In M. Hua, (Ed.).Studies of language, literature and culture, (pp. 118-126). Beijing: International Culture Publishing Corporation.
Liu, Y. (2008). Determinants of stall-holders’ address forms to customers in Beijing’s lowstatus clothing markets. Journal of Pragmatics 41, 638-648.
Liu, Y. (2009). A study on stall-holders’ addressing terms with reference to power
