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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. 220–244

Chapter 9
And the postcode darlin’. Vocative variation in service encounters on the telephone in Northern England

| University of Sheffield
The chapter presents the results of an investigation of vocative use in telephone service encounters in the British housing market. The investigation is based on 300+ “mystery shopping” telephone calls placed with real estate agents servicing four socio-economically different areas of a city in northern England. The results show how the contrastiveness inherent in the address system is put to use in context-specific decisions about relationship and transaction management in telephone service encounters: Vocative use is nonreciprocal and restricted to estate agents. The frequency of vocative use as well as choice of vocative type by estate agents (first name, last name, honorific, endearment) is socio-economically stratified and sensitive to socio-ethnic group membership projected through callers’ accent and name. Variation in vocative type within individual calls allows the agent to explicate an asymmetrical role relationship for the purpose of transaction control.
Keywords: vocatives, endearments, service encounters, telephone interactions, British English, Northern England
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Vocatives
    • 2.1Forms and semantic meaning
    • 2.2Pragmatic-communicative functions
    • 2.3Addressing and naming
    • 2.4Addressing and naming in telephone service encounters
  • 3.Data and analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Vocative types and variation (frequencies)
    • 4.2Endearments
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 6 September 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tar.5.09bau
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