The German second person personal pronoun du is commonly described as a deictic “shifter” or a
T-address term, which is incorporated as an argument of a predicate. Exploring the ways in which participants use pronouns in everyday
interaction, however, shows that these are not the only uses of du. In this paper, we examine vocative uses of
du in German everyday interaction. Drawing on methods of Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics, we
will show that speakers use vocative du for the management of being ‘with’ the other in terms of alignment as well as
affiliation. What du locally accomplishes, however, is sensitive to its positioning within the temporal unfolding of
turns and sequences as well as to the sequential environments in which it is used. Our findings demonstrate the context-sensitivity of
du and underscore the importance of linguistic resources for the interactional establishment and maintenance of
social togetherness and sociability.
Androutsopoulos, Jannis. 1998. Deutsche Jugendsprache. Untersuchungen zu ihren Strukturen und Funktionen. [German youth language. Investigations of its structures and functions.] Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Auer, Peter. 2005. “Projection in Interaction and Projection in Grammar.” Text 25 (1): 7–36.
Auer, Peter, and Jan Lindström. 2016. “Left/right Asymmetries and the Grammar of Pre- vs. Post-positioning in German and Swedish Talk-in-interaction.” Language Sciences 561: 68–92.
Auer, Peter, and Anja Stukenbrock. 2018. “When ‘you’ means ‘I’: The German 2nd Ps.Sg. Pronoun du between Genericity and Subjectivity.” Open Linguistics 41: 280–309.
Benveniste, Emile. 1966. Problèmes de linguistique générale. [Problems in general linguistics]. Paris: Éditions Gallimard.
Bergmann, Jörg. 1990. “On the Local Sensitivity of Conversation.” In The Dynamics of Dialogue, ed. by Ivana Markovà, and Klaus Foppa, 201–226. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Biq, Yung-O.1991. “The Multiple Uses of the Second Singular Pronoun ni in Conversational Mandarin.” Journal of Pragmatics 441: 929–957.
Brown, Roger, and Albert Gilman. 1960. “The Pronouns of Power and Solidarity.” In Style in Language, ed. by Thomas A. Sebeok, 253–276. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen Levinson. 1987. Politeness. Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bühler, Karl. 1934/1965. Sprachtheorie. Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache. [Language theory. The representational function of language.] Stuttgart: Fischer.
Butler, Carly W., Susan Danby, and Michael Emmison. 2011. “Address Terms in Turn Beginnings: Managing Disalignment and Disaffiliation in Telephone Counseling.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 44 (4): 338–358.
Clayman, Steven. 2010. “Address Terms in the Service of Other Actions: The Case of News Interview Talk.” Discourse & Communication 4 (2): 161–183.
Clayman, Steven. 2012. “Address Terms in the Organization of Turns at Talk: The Case of Pivotal Turn Extensions.” Journal of Pragmatics 441: 1853–1867.
Clayman, Steven. 2013. “Agency in Response: The Role of Prefatory Address Terms.” Journal of Pragmatics 571: 290–302.
Clyne, Michael, Catrin Norrby, and Jane Warren. 2009. Language and Human Relations. Styles of Address in Contemporary Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth. 2009. “Relatedness and Timing in Talk-in-interaction.” In Where Prosody Meets Pragmatics, ed. by Dagmar Barth-Weingarten, Nicole Dehé, and Anne Wichmann, 257–276. Bingley: Emerald.
Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth, and Margret Selting. 2017. Interactional Linguistics. Studying Language in Social Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
d’Avis, Franz, and Jörg Meibauer. 2013. “Du Idiot! Din idiot! Pseudo-vocative Constructions and Insults in German (and Swedish).” In Vocative! Addressing between System and Performance, ed. by Barbara Sonnenhauser, and Patrizia Noel Aziz Hanna, 189–217. Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter.
Deppermann, Arnulf. 2013. “Turn-design at Turn-beginnings: Multimodal Resources to Deal with Tasks of Turn-construction in German.” Journal of Pragmatics 461: 91–121.
Deppermann, Arnulf, and Susanne Günthner. 2015. “Introduction: Temporality in Interaction.” In Temporality in Interaction, ed. by Arnulf Deppermann, and Susanne Günthner, 1–26. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Droste, Pepe. 2018. Korpus ‚Multimodale Interaktion‘ [Corpus ‘multimodal interaction’]. University of Münster.
Droste, Pepe, and Susanne Günthner. 2020. “‚das mAchst du bestimmt AUCH du;‘: Zum Zusammenspiel syntaktischer, prosodischer und sequenzieller Aspekte syntaktisch desintegrierter du-Formate. [‘das mAchst du bestimmt AUCH du;’: On the interplay of syntactic, prosodic and sequential aspects syntactically disintegrated formats of du.]” In Prosodie und Konstruktionsgrammatik. [Construction Grammar and Prosody], ed. by Wolfgang Imo, and Jens Philipp Lanwer, 75–110. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter.
Goffman, Ervin. 1963. Behavior in Public Places. Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. New York: The Free Press.
Goffman, Ervin. 1971. Relations in Public. Microstudies of the Public Order. New York: Basic Books.
Goffman, Ervin. 1981. Forms of Talk. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Goodwin, Charles. 1980. “Restarts, Pauses, and the Achievement of Mutual Gaze at Turn-beginning.” Sociological Inquiry 50 (3–4): 272–302.
Goodwin, Charles. 1981. Conversational Organization. Interaction between Speakers and Hearers. New York: Academic Press.
Goodwin, Charles, and Marjorie H. Goodwin. 2004. “Participation.” In A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, ed. by Alessandro Duranti, 222–244. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Günthner, Susanne. 2016. “Praktiken erhöhter Dialogizität: onymische Anredeformen als Gesten personifizierter Zuwendung. [Practices of increased dialogism: Onymic forms of address as gestures of personified other-orientation.]” Zeitschrift für Germanistische Linguistik 44 (3): 406–436.
Günthner, Susanne. 2019. “Namentliche Anreden in onkologischen Aufklärungsgesprächen: eine interaktional ausgerichtete Studie zu Formen und Funktionen onymischer Anreden. [Onymic address in oncologic briefings: An interactional-oriented study of the forms and functions of onymic address.]” Arbeitspapiere Sprache und Interaktion (SpIn) 821.
Hewitt, John P., and Stokes, Randall. 1975. “Disclaimers.” American Sociological Review 40 (1): 1–11.
Hickey, Raymond. 2003. “The German Address System: Binary and Scalar at once.” In Diachronic Perspectives on Address Term Systems, ed. by Irma Taavitsainen, and Andreas H. Jucker, 401–425. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Jakobson, Roman. 1957/1971. “Shifters, Verbal Categories, and the Russian Verb”. In Selected Writings, Vol. 21, 130–147. The Hague: Mouton.
Jespersen, Otto. 1923. Language. Its Nature, Development, and Origin. New York: Allen & Unwin.
Kendon, Adam. 1990. Conducting Interaction. Patterns of Behavior in Focused Encounters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kretzenbacher, Heinz L.1991. “Vom Sie zum Du – und retour? [From Sie to Du – and back?]” In Vom Sie zum Du – mehr als eine neue Konvention? [From Sie to Du – More than a new convention?], ed. by Heinz L. Kretzenbacher, and Wulf Segebrecht, 9–78. Hamburg/Zürich: Luchterhand.
Kretzenbacher, Heinz L.2010. “‚Man ordnet ja bestimmte Leute irgendwo ein für sich…‘ Anrede und soziale Deixis. [‘Man ordnet ja bestimmte Leute irgendwo ein für sich…’ Address and social deixis.]” Deutsche Sprache 381: 1–18.
Lindström, Anna, and Marja-Leena Sorjonen. 2013. Affiliation in Conversation. In The Handbook of Conversation Analysis, ed. by Jack Sidnell, and Tanya Stivers, 350–369. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Mondada, Lorenza. 2009. “Emergent Focused Interactions in Public Places: A Systematic Analysis of the Multimodal Achievement of a Common Interactional Space.” Journal of Pragmatics 411: 1977–1997.
Mondada, Lorenza. 2013a. “Embodied and Spatial Resources for Turn-taking in Institutional Multi-party Interactions: Participatory Democracy Debates.” Journal of Pragmatics 461, 39–68.
Mondada, Lorenza. 2013b. “Interactional Space and the Study of Embodied Talk-in-interaction.” In Space in Language and Linguistics. Geographical, Interactional, and Cognitive Perspectives, ed. by Peter Auer, Martin Hilpert, Anja Stukenbrock, and Benedikt Szmrecsanyi, 247–275. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter.
Mondada, Lorenza. 2018. “Multiple Temporalities of Language and Body in Interaction: Challenges for Transcribing Multimodality.” In Research on Language and Social Interaction 51 (1): 85–106.
Mortensen, Kristian. 2009. “Establishing Recipiency in Pre-beginning Position in the Second Language Classroom.” Discourse Processes 46 (5): 491–515.
Oh, Sun-Young. 2007. “Overt Reference to Speaker and Recipient in Korean.” Discourse Studies 9 (4): 462–492.
Raymond, Geoffrey. 2003. “Grammar and Social Organization: Yes/No Interrogatives and the Structure of Responding.” American Sociological Review 68 (6): 939–967.
Raymond, Chase. 2016. “Linguistic Reference in the Negotiation of Identity and Action: Revisiting the T/V Distinction.” Language 92 (3): 636–670.
Rendle-Short, Johanna. 2007. “‘Catherine, you’re Wasting your Time’: Address Terms within the Australian Political Interview.” Journal of Pragmatics 391: 1503–1525.
Rendle-Short, Johanna. 2011. “Address Terms in the Australian Political News Interview.” In Talking Politics in Broadcast Media. Cross-cultural Perspectives on Political Interviewing, Journalism and Accountability, ed. by Mats Ekström, and Marianna Patrona, 93–111. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson. 1974. “A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation.” Language 50 (4): 696–735.
Schegloff, Emanuel A.1996. “Turn Organization: One Intersection of Grammar and Interaction.” In Interaction and Grammar, ed. by Elinor Ochs, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Sandra A. Thompson, 52–133. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schütz, Alfred, and Thomas Luckmann. 1973. The Structures of the Life-World. London: Heinemann.
Schwitalla, Johannes. 1995. “Namen in Gesprächen. [Names in conversations.]” In Namenforschung. Ein internationales Handbuch zur Onomastik [Onomastics. An international handbook on onomastics], ed. by Ernst Eichler, Gerold Hilty, Heinrich Löffler, Hugo Steger, and Ladislav Zgusta, 498–504. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter.
Schwitalla, Johannes. 2010. “Kommunikative Funktionen von Sprecher- und Adressatennamen in Gesprächen. [Communicative functions of names of speakers and addressees in conversations.]” In Eigennamen in der gesprochenen Sprache [Proper names in spoken language], ed. by Nicolas Pepin, and Elwys De Stefani, 197–199. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Selting, Margretet al.2011. “A System for Transcribing Talk-in-interaction: GAT 2. Translated and adapted for English by Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen and Dagmar Barth-Weingarten.” Gesprächsforschung – Online-Zeitschrift zur verbalen Interaktion 121: 1–51.
Stivers, Tanya. 2008. “Stance, Alignment, and Affiliation during Storytelling: When Nodding is a Token of Affiliation.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 41 (1): 31–57.
Stivers, Tanya, Lorenza Mondada, and Jakob Steensig. 2011. “Knowledge, Morality and Affiliation in Social Interaction.” In The Morality of Knowledge in Conversation, ed. by Tanya Stivers, Lorenza Mondada, and Jakob Steensig, 3–26. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stivers, Tanya, and Federico Rossano. 2010. “Mobilizing Response.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 43 (1): 3–31.
Wootton, Anthony J.1981. “Children’s Use of Address Terms.” In Adult–Child Conversations, ed. by Peter French, and Margaret Maclure, 142–158. London: Croom Helm.
Zifonun, Gisela, Ludger Hoffmann, and Bruno Strecker. 1997. Grammatik der deutschen Sprache. [Grammar of German language.] Berlin/New York: de Gruyter.
Cited by (5)
Cited by five other publications
Ebner, Johannes
2024. Pronomengebrauch und Konfliktdynamik. Exemplarische Analyse einer Gewalteskalation. Zeitschrift für Soziologie 53:2 ► pp. 201 ff.
Chen, Li-Chi
2023. ‘Smash this sissy boy’s mouth, Cuiguo!’: Framing and humor in gay Taiwanese YouTubers’ self-disclosures about being bullied. Discourse & Communication 17:2 ► pp. 135 ff.
2021. Conversation and Culture. Annual Review of Anthropology 50:1 ► pp. 219 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 21 september 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.