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It's different with you: Contrastive perspectives on address research
Edited by Nicole Baumgarten and Roel Vismans
[Topics in Address Research 5] 2023
► pp. 113–141

Chapter 5
Practices of person reference in Chinese and German interactions

A contrastive analysis of “third person reference forms” in SMS, WhatsApp and WeChat communication

| University of Münster,
Referring to persons in interaction is a central human practice (Enfield 2007: 97), which is located at an intersection where cultural, linguistic, and interactional conventions meet (Levinson 2005: 433). In this paper, I will analyse practices of “third person reference forms” used by participants in Chinese and German SMS-, WeChat- and WhatsApp-interactions. Both Chinese and German speakers make use of a range of different types of third person reference forms to laterally address their co-participants. I will argue that third person reference forms do more than simply refer to one’s co-participant: Speakers employ these practices as a “social index” (Silverstein 1976: 37) to contextualise various social meanings which would be hidden in cases of “referring simpliciter” (Schegloff 1996). In addition to finding parallels in the use of third person reference forms in our Chinese and German data, I also detect differences in the employment of forms of addressing one’s co-participants.
Keywords: German, Chinese, third person reference form(s), deictic forms/pronouns, kinship terms, honorifics, pet names, ad hoc descriptors
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Reference to persons in everyday interactions: Nominal forms of referring to addressed recipients
  • 3.Third person reference forms in Chinese and German interactions
    • 3.1Kinship terms
      • 3.1.1Interactions between parents and children
      • 3.1.2Interactions between siblings and cousins
      • 3.1.3The construction of ‘metaphorical kinship-relations’ by using kinship terms among non-kin participants
    • 3.2Pet names
    • 3.3Ad hoc descriptors and names
    • 3.4Honorifics
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 September 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tar.5.05gun
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