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This study investigates the key forms of address used amongst Jordanian university students, the impact of gender on using these forms and what accounts for the variation in their address system. By addressing the issue of normativity and heterogeneity in the use of address terms, in different social settings, the study enriches the understanding of the internal variation of the address term system. Data collected through questionnaires and semi-structured interviews were analysed, based on Watts’ discursive approach to politeness and Agha’s approach of indexicality. The results revealed that the identified normative patterns represent Jordanian university politic behaviours, which index different social meanings and relations among the youth community, in relation to specific social contexts. The most frequent strategies university students use for addressing others are personal names, innovative terms, descriptive phrases, pronouns, titles, teknonyms, and religious, military, attention attractors, as well as a combination of these terms. It also seems that there are no absolute stable patterns of address term usage among the youth community, speaking Jordanian Arabic. Rather, there is an infinite society-internal heterogeneity in the address terms usage. The results also revealed that an intra-group variation signifies social struggles over the norms of address term usage and potentially normative incertitude.

The present study examines the effect of priming on business ethical decision making. Priming is based on the idea that our perceptions, actions, and emotions are distorted by unconscious cues from our environment. Subjects were primed for either \"politeness\" or \"rudeness\" using a sentence completion task. Following the priming, the subjects were asked to react to a series of ethical scenarios. The results showed that subjects primed for \"rudeness\" perceived the scenarios as less unethical than subjects primed for \"politeness\". Similar results were observed in both the American and the Dominican samples. The results indicate that business ethical decision making is influenced by environmental factors we are unaware off.

This paper investigates the sociopragmatic features of American learners of Korean-as-a-foreign language (KFL) in the Korean speech act of apology. As an interlanguage pragmatic study that deals with cultures that are distant to English, such as Korean, this study considers cross-cultural and pedagogical implications. The data were collected from a Discourse Completion Task (DCT), then analyzed descriptively, and Korean apology formulae were identified. In general, the most popular apology formulae the three groups use are similar. The deviations of the kfl learners are found mainly in the frequency rather than in the types of the semantic formulae. The findings of this study indicate that Koreans reflect much stronger power-sensitivity than kfl learners, and the distance variable seems to take precedence over the power variables in America. On the whole, the apology formulae usage of Korean native speakers supports the stereotypical description of Koreans as being more collectivistic, hierarchical, and formalistic in comparison with Americans. Furthermore, the results that the semantic formulae usage patterns of the kfl learners are, in general, consistent with those of the American English native speakers indicate the traces of L1 transfer effects.

A theoretical framework is presented to account for various means of indirect verbal communication used by the Baatombu of northern Benin to accomplish face-threatening acts, and a particular technique involving dog names is discussed. By carefully choosing a proverbial name for a puppy, the owner can then, simply by calling the dog, convey a message meant either for a particular neighbor or for anyone who hears it and feels concerned by its content. This diplomatic way of expressing oneself when a difference arises is doubly indirect: (a) The dog's owner makes use of a pseudo-addressee (the dog), and (b) the message is formulated with a proverb, therefore with words of which the owner is not the author. (Animal names, Africa, communicative acts, ethnography of speaking, indirectness, politeness, speech acts)

This chapter contains sections titled: Genealogy Familial Ties Race: A Renaissance Category? Notes References and Further Reading

Personal reference is the use of an expression to pick out a person, as in When did John eat the cookies? or Tell Dr. Elwood that I need to see him. This article explores the social factors involved in how speakers choose a referring expression in a given situation. Five experiments were conducted which presented speakers with scenarios and asked them how they would refer to a particular person in that situation. The results showed that speakers were sensitive to the level of intimacy between the speaker and referent, between the addressee and referent, and between a nonparticipating audience and the referent. To a lesser degree, the relation between the speaker and the addressee also influenced choice of referring expression. The results can be explained by a theory that posits that speakers are attempting to preserve their faces and the faces of their addressees in choosing these terms, and so they avoid references that could be face threatening. This theory can be integrated with current theories of object reference and the choice of address terms. (Reference, address, politeness, personal reference)

Carter discusses the incivility of calling a stranger by their first name. He believes calling a person by their first name is privilege, not a right.

As has been noted, the sweetest sound to anyone's ears is that of his own name. And perhaps the sourest are generic designations. \"Ma'am\" magically manages to combine both the generic and the potentially insulting. So, if you want to connect with what is probably a sizeable proportion of consumers, you know at least one word to can. The proviso is it be done in good cheer and with purity of purpose. Companies really ought to rigorously scour mailing-list names to: 1. determine, as much as possible, first names and surnames, and 2. ensure something has not gone hideously wrong.

The United States, of course, is unique in never having had the use of titles. They, at least, fought a war of independence in order to get rid of them. Still, show me an American hostess whose knees don't go weak at the sight of some broken-down Eurotrasher with a handle, and I'll show you a rare specimen indeed. Americans are rather sweet in their ignorance about European titles.