Project description
Personal and non-personal forms of address in Romance languages
The forms of address in Romance languages may reveal social differences in hierarchy and distance. The MSCA-funded DE-PERSONAlisation project focuses on second-person address forms and non-personal strategies used in three contiguous languages: European Portuguese, Peninsular Spanish, and French from France and Belgium. The project uses an empirical approach that combines natural and elicited data from five sources. It aims to establish, for each language, a sociolinguistic correlation between the use of each form of address (including non-personal strategies) and contextual and sociolinguistic variables of speakers and addressees, with a focus on gender. Additionally, the project includes a pragmalinguistic study of non-personal strategies and a multi-contrastive analysis among the three languages.
Objective
The proposed research project focuses on second-person address forms (e.g. tu/vous in French) and non-personal strategies that avoid any reference to the addressee (e.g. impersonal constructions) in three contiguous standard languages: European Portuguese, Peninsular Spanish, and French from France and from Belgium. Address forms provide information about a number of features related to the interlocutors (age, sociocultural level, gender, etc.), the type of relationship they share (e.g. close friends vs. distant acquaintances), and their relative social roles (e.g. boss vs. employee). Therefore, analysing these forms may reveal social differences in terms of hierarchy or distance that show inequalities. In spite of the existence of relatively similar forms, due to their common Latin origin, the use of the address forms differs across the three languages. Indeed, the literature has not yet provided a full picture of the use of these forms because of their variability in speech and the many factors that influence which form is chosen. DE-PERSONAlisation aims to fill this void with an empirical approach based on a triangulation of methods and a combination of natural and elicited data from five different sources. The project seeks to establish for each language a sociolinguistic correlation (quantitative analysis) between the use of each form of address (including non-personal strategies) and the contextual and sociolinguistic variables of speakers and addressees, focusing on their gender, since little attention has been paid to this variable in research on these languages. Furthermore, concerning the non-personal strategies, an innovative pragmalinguistics study is carried out of which types are used (qualitative analysis) in relation with these variables. Finally, the project includes a multi-contrastive analysis between the three languages to show common and different patterns of use, focusing on the importance of the participants gender variable.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
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Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European FellowshipsCoordinator
1348 Louvain La Neuve
Belgium