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Article published In:
Linguistics in the Netherlands 2022
Edited by Jorrig Vogels and Sterre Leufkens
[Linguistics in the Netherlands 39] 2022
► pp. 39–54

Pronouns of address in recruitment advertisements from multinational companies

| Radboud University
| Radboud University
| Radboud University

In Netherlandish Dutch, Belgian Dutch, German, French, and Spanish, speakers have a choice between formal (V) and informal (T) pronouns of address. We present a quantitative study of how V and T are used on recruitment pages of multinational companies. Our corpus-based method is inspired by studies on pronouns of address in Netherlandish and Belgian Dutch by Vismans (2007) and Waterlot (2014). Unlike these earlier studies, we provide a comparison of the same companies recruiting in different countries, thereby strengthening the comparison of V- and T-forms between languages. We find a preference for T in recruitment ads in Belgian Dutch, Netherlandish Dutch, and Spanish, while we find a preference for V in French. There seems to be no clear preference for either V or T in German, which may reflect that address preferences in German are changing or ambiguous.

Keywords: pronouns of address, corpus analysis, pragmatics, cross-linguistic differences
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
  • 3.Method
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Open data
  • Note
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 4 November 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.00060.har
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Rosseel, Laura, Eline Zenner, Fabian Faviana & Bavo Van Landeghem
2024. The (Lack of) Salience of T/V Pronouns in Professional Communication: Evidence from an Experimental Study for Belgian Dutch. Languages 9:3 ► pp. 112 ff. DOI logo
Schoenmakers, Gert-Jan, Jihane Hachimi & Helen de Hoop
2024. Can You Make a Difference? The Use of (In)Formal Address Pronouns in Advertisement Slogans. Journal of International Consumer Marketing 36:2 ► pp. 99 ff. DOI logo

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