Enacting ‘Being with You’: Vocative uses of du (“you”) in German everyday interaction
Abstract
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.
Keywords:
Publication history
1.Introduction
This study deals with vocative uses of the second person personal pronoun du in German everyday interaction. Second person personal pronouns have long been studied as “shifters” (Jespersen 1923Jespersen, Otto 1923 Language. Its Nature, Development, and Origin. New York: Allen & Unwin.
; Jakobson 1957/1971Jakobson, Roman 1957/1971 “Shifters, Verbal Categories, and the Russian Verb”. In Selected Writings, Vol. 2, 130–147. The Hague: Mouton.), which are dependent on the interactive structure of communication and participant roles (Benveniste 1966Benveniste, Emile 1966 Problèmes de linguistique générale. [Problems in general linguistics]. Paris: Éditions Gallimard.). Most research on second person personal pronouns focuses on elements that occur as arguments of a predicate. For example, conversation analytic studies have shed light on second person pronouns being “recipient indicators” and serving as a resource for the management of turn-taking in multi-party interactions (Lerner 1996Lerner, Gene H. 1996 “On the Place of Linguistic Resources in the Organization of Talk-in-Interaction: ‘Second Person’ Reference in Multi-Party Conversation.” Pragmatics 6 (3): 281–294. 
, 2003 2003 “Selecting Next Speaker: The Context-sensitive Operation of a Context-free Organization.” Language in Society 32 (2): 177–201. ). Using the second person personal pronoun in multi-party interactions clearly indexes that not all, but indeed one of the participants has been selected as next speaker – it does not, however, specify which one. Indeed, the second person pronoun needs to be combined with other cues like gaze to aid in the accomplishment of reference and addressing, disambiguating the speaker selection by binding auditive and visual modalities together.
For many years, streams of sociolinguistic and pragmatic research following Brown and Gilman (1960)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. and Brown and Levinson (1987)Brown, Penelope, and Stephen Levinson 1987 Politeness. Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. have been focusing on T/V distinctions and the implications of alternative pronominal forms of address for politeness. In accordance with these interests, much attention has been devoted to the structures of the German pronominal address system (e.g., Hickey 2003Hickey, 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. ; Simon 2003Simon, Horst 2003 “From Pragmatics to Grammar: Tracing the Development of ‘Respect’ in the History of the German Pronouns of Address.” In Diachronic Perspectives on Address Term Systems, ed. by Irma Taavitsainen, and Andreas H. Jucker, 85–123. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. ), and the uses and ideologies embracing the present-day distinction of non-polite du and polite Sie (e.g., Clyne et al. 2009Clyne, Michael, Catrin Norrby, and Jane Warren 2009 Language and Human Relations. Styles of Address in Contemporary Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ; Kretzenbacher 2010 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 38: 1–18.; Liebscher et al. 2010Liebscher, Grit, Jennifer Dailey-O’Cain, Mareike Müller, and Tetyana Reichert 2010 “Negotiating Identities through Pronouns of Address in an Immigrant Community.” Pragmatics 20 (3): 375–400. ). Furthermore, ‘non-prototypical’ uses have been studied, e.g., uses of du as non-addressee deictic pronoun (e.g., Auer and Stukenbrock 2018Auer, Peter, and Anja Stukenbrock 2018 “When ‘you’ means ‘I’: The German 2nd Ps.Sg. Pronoun du between Genericity and Subjectivity.” Open Linguistics 4: 280–309. ).
Analyses of German everyday interaction, however, show that uses of du as argument of a predicate are not its only uses. For example, consider the following episode of a telephone interaction between two sisters, Tina and Marina. In the extract, the personal pronoun du is used three times. However, the occurrences have different syntactic status: whereas du is an argument in the reported speech frame in line 6, it is syntactically peripheral in lines 12 and 18:
01 Tina: ja nee dem der muss sich wIrklich mehr RUhe antun;
yes he surely needs more rest
02 Marina: MUSS der auch;
he must do
03 der KANN [das auch/]
he can that
04 Tina: [ja::: ][:::::; ]
yes
05 Marina: [ich hab ihm auch gesacht;]
I also told him
→ 06 ich sag du bist keine DREIßig mehr,
I say “you aren’t thirty anymore”
07 Tina: nee; (.)
yes
08 n=das- (.)
and that
09 marina das MERKT man SO.
Marina you can notice that
10 ich WEISS [das] wohl ne,
I know that right
11 Marina: [ja;]
yes
→ 12 ja [das is nich so EINfach du;]
yes it’s not that easy du11.Since rendering the vocative uses of du in the English translations is very difficult, we refrain from translating vocative uses of du. In the English translations they will be represented by using the German original du.
13 Tina: [ich mErk das ja AUCH; ]
I realize that too
14 (-)
15 Tina: ne,
well
16 Marina: ne,
isn’t it
17 j[a:;]
yes:
→ 18 Tina: [du ] und [eh ]b;
du and ehm
19 Marina: [ne,]
well
20 [und-]
and
21 Tina: [WIE ] war das jetz nochmAl-
what happened exactly
22 aNIta hatte geschrieben dass die carla VOLKner tot is,
Anita had written that Carla Volkner is dead
23 Marina: ja nee briGITte; (.)
yes no Brigitte
24 Tina: ach briGITte hat das geschrieben.
oh Brigitte wrote that
Not much research has been devoted to such ‘non-prototypical’ uses of du in German (as in lines 12 and 18) and to vocative or syntactically non-integrated personal pronouns in general (but see e.g., Biq 1991Biq, Yung-O. 1991 “The Multiple Uses of the Second Singular Pronoun ni in Conversational Mandarin.” Journal of Pragmatics 44: 929–957.; Bladas and Nogué 2016Bladas, Òscar, and Neus Nogué 2016 “ ‘Que bé tu!’: An Emerging Emphatic Use of the Second Person Singular Pronoun tu (you) in Spoken Catalan.” Pragmatics 26 (3): 473–500. ; Droste and Günthner 2020Droste, 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.). The instances of du in lines 12 and 18 are similar to nominal vocatives as in line 09 as they are grammatically optional22.Note also the similarities with the occurrence of personal pronouns in pro-drop languages, where overt reference by using the second person personal pronoun is marked and used for specific actions (see e.g., Oh 2007Oh, Sun-Young 2007 “Overt Reference to Speaker and Recipient in Korean.” Discourse Studies 9 (4): 462–492. ). and appear in the same syntactic and turn-constructional patterns, being either pre-positioned (line 18), post-positioned (line 13) or standing alone. In Extract 1, vocative du occurs not only in different positions but also in distinct action environments: In line 12, du is used turn-finally, completing a statement in the course of the participants’ mutual display of understanding and affiliation; whereas in line 18, it is deployed turn-initially preceding a topic shift. In this dyadic interaction on the phone, syntactically disintegrated du is completely redundant as a resource for the basic task of addressing as the participation framework renders the direction of talk transparent and knowable in advance. Thus, the question arises: what do participants ‘do’ when they use vocative du in interaction?
Interactional-oriented studies have contributed to a better understanding that vocatives are used “in the service of a variety of actions beyond addressing per se” (Clayman 2010Clayman, Steven 2010 “Address Terms in the Service of Other Actions: The Case of News Interview Talk.” Discourse & Communication 4 (2): 161–183. , 163; for overviews see Schwitalla 1995Schwitalla, 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., 2010 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.; Günthner 2016Günthner, 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. ; Couper-Kuhlen and Selting 2017Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth, and Margret Selting 2017 Interactional Linguistics. Studying Language in Social Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.). Participants rely on vocatives for a plethora of purposes, e.g., displaying a profiled orientation towards the other (Günthner 2016Günthner, 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. , 2019), selecting next speakers (Sacks et al. 1974Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson 1974 “A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation.” Language 50 (4): 696–735. ), ensuring recipiency (Lerner 2003 2003 “Selecting Next Speaker: The Context-sensitive Operation of a Context-free Organization.” Language in Society 32 (2): 177–201. ; Wootton 1981Wootton, 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.), launching topic shifts (Clayman 2010Clayman, Steven 2010 “Address Terms in the Service of Other Actions: The Case of News Interview Talk.” Discourse & Communication 4 (2): 161–183. ; Rendle-Short 2011 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. ; Droste and Günthner 2020Droste, 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.), mobilizing response (Droste and Günthner 2020Droste, 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.), indexing sequential departure (Rendle-Short 2007Rendle-Short, Johanna 2007 “ ‘Catherine, you’re Wasting your Time’: Address Terms within the Australian Political Interview.” Journal of Pragmatics 39: 1503–1525. , 2011 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. ; Clayman 2013 2013 “Agency in Response: The Role of Prefatory Address Terms.” Journal of Pragmatics 57: 290–302. ; Butler et al. 2011Butler, 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. ), or accomplishing ‘significance’ or ‘sincerity’ (Clayman 2010Clayman, Steven 2010 “Address Terms in the Service of Other Actions: The Case of News Interview Talk.” Discourse & Communication 4 (2): 161–183. ; Günthner 2016Günthner, 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. ). Since the early work of Wootton (1981)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., interactional-oriented studies add to the evidence that uses of vocatives in distinct syntactic and turn-organizational positions perform distinct actions (Lerner 2003 2003 “Selecting Next Speaker: The Context-sensitive Operation of a Context-free Organization.” Language in Society 32 (2): 177–201. ; Rendle-Short 2007Rendle-Short, Johanna 2007 “ ‘Catherine, you’re Wasting your Time’: Address Terms within the Australian Political Interview.” Journal of Pragmatics 39: 1503–1525. ; Clayman 2012 2012 “Address Terms in the Organization of Turns at Talk: The Case of Pivotal Turn Extensions.” Journal of Pragmatics 44: 1853–1867. ; Günthner 2016Günthner, 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. , 2019 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) 82.; Droste and Günthner 2020Droste, 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.): While pre-positioned, turn-prefacing vocatives tend to be deployed in order to attract the attention of the addressee and to establish mutual orientation, post-positioned, turn-following vocatives tend to be deployed as stance-markers.
In the literature, vocative du is mentioned only sporadically, as an aside. The few references to vocative du point to the following two aspects: First, uses of vocative du may serve structural tasks of participation. As early as 1934, Bühler (1934/1965Bühler, Karl 1934/1965 Sprachtheorie. Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache. [Language theory. The representational function of language.] Stuttgart: Fischer., 114) mentions the vocative use of du and calls it “Appellwort”, i.e. a summons that precedes focused interaction, checking co-presence and availability of an addressee to attend to the projected talk for which s/he is selected as recipient. These observations are advanced by Auer (1996Auer, Peter 1996 “The Pre-front Field Position in Spoken German and its Relevance as a Grammaticalization Position.” Pragmatics 6 (3): 295–322. , 2005 2005 “Projection in Interaction and Projection in Grammar.” Text 25 (1): 7–36. ) who describes forms of syntactic “condensation” of the summons-answer-continuation sequence by the prefacing of turns with du allowing tasks beyond the establishment of co-presence and mutual availability to be accomplished:
Since co-presence was established beforehand, the original function of the summons is also no longer valid; the pre-front field vocative can now take on a variety of contextualizing functions, such as to mark topic shifts or to introduce central or critical conversational moves.(Auer 2005 2005 “Projection in Interaction and Projection in Grammar.” Text 25 (1): 7–36.
Second, uses of vocative du may also manage affective issues of participation, not only directing the attention of the addressee but also indexing relational closeness and social solidarity of speaker and addressee (Zifonun et al. 1997Zifonun, Gisela, Ludger Hoffmann, and Bruno Strecker 1997 Grammatik der deutschen Sprache. [Grammar of German language.] Berlin/New York: de Gruyter., 321, 925). Correspondingly, Kretzenbacher (1991)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. briefly describes du as an address term that verbally “nudges” the particular other and constructs a stance of other-attentiveness by metapragmatically glossing the direction of talk.33.Furthermore, vocative du may index registers of social personhood and conversational styles (e.g., Kretzenbacher 1991Kretzenbacher, 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.; Androutsopoulos 1998Androutsopoulos, Jannis 1998 Deutsche Jugendsprache. Untersuchungen zu ihren Strukturen und Funktionen. [German youth language. Investigations of its structures and functions.] Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.). In the following, we refrain from addressing this issue.
Droste and Günthner (2020)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. is the only systematic study on syntactically disintegrated du. Their interactional analyses of everyday interactions add to the insight that participants use du for the management of a vast range of both structural as well as affective issues of participation. They provide evidence that du is “positionally sensitive” (Schegloff 1996Schegloff, 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. ; Lindström 2014Lindström, Jan 2014 “On the Place of Turn and Sequence in Grammar. Verb-first Clausal Constructions in Swedish Talk-in-interaction.” Pragmatics 24 (3): 507–532. ; Auer and Lindström 2016Auer, 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 56: 68–92. ) as it performs specific interactional tasks depending upon its position.44.For brief notes on du see also Androutsopoulos (1998Androutsopoulos, Jannis 1998 Deutsche Jugendsprache. Untersuchungen zu ihren Strukturen und Funktionen. [German youth language. Investigations of its structures and functions.] Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang., 480). Furthermore, they show that the positioning within the temporally unfolding structure of turn-constructional units (TCUs) is intricately intertwined with prosodic formatting. Regardless of the position, the degree of prosodic separation from the turn proper correlates with the intensity of the break with what has immediately preceded and the necessity of local reorientation. Hence, turn-organizational and prosodic formatting of du is iconically linked with local contingencies (cf. also Couper-Kuhlen 2004Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth 2004 “Prosody and Sequence Organization in English Conversation. The Case of New Beginnings.” In Sound Patterns in Interaction, ed. by Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, and Cecilia E. Ford, 335–376. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. , 2009 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. ). However, the study is limited to the use of du in specific sequential environments, i.e. new beginnings, repair in contexts of recognizable disengagement and stance-takings. The questions of how the heterogenous variety of actions performed in du-turns are related and what makes du serve as a local device of (dis)alignment, affiliation or both remain unanswered.
This paper extends Droste and Günthner’s (2020) work on du to further sequential environments and uses methods of Interactional Linguistics and Conversation Analysis to examine in detail what participants ‘do’ when they use vocative du in social interaction. We draw on the distinction of alignment and affiliation (Stivers 2008Stivers, 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 et al. 2011Stivers, 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. ) to examine how du relates to the sequential environments in which it is deployed. Alignment involves the structural organization of interaction and refers to how well an action fits with the activity in progress. Aligning actions are ones “facilitating the proposed activity or sequence; accepting the presuppositions and terms of the proposed action or activity; and matching the formal design preference of the turn” (Stivers et al. 2011Stivers, 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. , 21). By affiliation we refer to the affective level of interaction, i.e., how turns relate to the affective stance displayed by the other. Affiliative actions are “maximally pro-social when they match the prior speaker’s evaluative stance, display empathy and/or cooperate with the preference of the prior action” (Stivers et al. 2011Stivers, 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. , 21). The central claim of the paper is that vocative du proposes, solicits and displays alignment and/or affiliation as ways of being ‘with’ the other. This being ‘with’ may embrace (re)establishing joint attention, initiating disjunctive moves, indexing sequential departures as well as displaying and soliciting affiliation.
2.The collection
This study is based on large corpora of video- or audio-recorded everyday interactions between speakers of German (face-to-face interactions, telephone- as well as skype-interactions). Data are taken from the lAuDa corpus (University of Münster),55.
https://lauda-ms.lingdata.de/
the KoMI corpus (Droste 2018Droste, Pepe 2018 Korpus ‚Multimodale Interaktion‘ [Corpus ‘multimodal interaction’]. University of Münster.), the publicly accessible database FOLK of the Institute for the German Language in Mannheim, Germany,66.
http://dgd.ids-mannheim.de/
and a corpus from a reality TV-show (University of Freiburg)77.Thanks to Peter Auer for providing access to the data. that cover a very broad range of settings and a large number of speakers of different ages and from many regions within Germany. From these corpora, we collected all instances of du in which du (i) is not an argument of a predicate and (ii) serves to indicate an addressee. Thus, syntactically integrated uses of du, in which du is the subject of the predicate (Extract 2), analeptic uses (Extract 3) and subjects of imperatives (Extract 4) are excluded from the collection.
01 Marina: ich sag du bist keine DREIßig mehr,
I say “you aren’t thirty anymore”
01 Maren: WAS für ne liga sEId ihr so? (.)
in which league do you play
Noah: oberliga;
oberliga
(-)
→ Maren: und DU?
and you
(-)
Tim: bezirks;
bezirksliga
01 Jörg: ja mAch du erst mal deinen KOFfer in ruhe.
yes, do your bag in peace and comfort for now
Instances of du, which may be termed “pseudo-vocatives” (d’Avis and Meibauer 2013d’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. ), were also excluded from the collection (Extract 5).
01 Vera: °hh oh lySANder.=
oh Lysander
→ 02 du (.) PENner,
you bum
Furthermore, cases in which the syntactic status of du was unclear, e.g. multiple instances of du at turn-beginnings (see Extract 6) were also left out.
01 Paula: ja:;
yes
→ 02 und du du musst jetzt gleich LOS oder nich?
and you/du you have to leave now, don’t you
03 schon?
already
The interactions in which vocative du is used are all informal, involving family, intimates and friends engaging in a wide variety of everyday activities; working, having meals, or just chatting. Additionally, vocative du only occurs in interactional episodes in which the participants refer to each other with the non-polite pronoun du (not polite Sie). However, our data does not provide evidence that the distinction of so-called T-forms and V-forms invokes contextual dimensions that participants orient to when using vocative du in social interaction.88.But see Raymond’s (2016)Raymond, Chase 2016 “Linguistic Reference in the Negotiation of Identity and Action: Revisiting the T/V Distinction.” Language 92 (3): 636–670. investigation of shifts between T-forms and V-forms in Peruvian Spanish, showing that participants rely on these resources to accomplish important elements of identity in the service of social action.
Our collection yields more than 250 cases – both cases in which du is combined with other lexical elements (e.g., first names, interjections, discourse markers etc.) as well as cases in which it is not combined with other lexical elements. All cases were categorized based on turn construction. We found the following formats: (i) stand-alone du (occupying the whole turn and performing a social action on its own) as well as (ii) turn-prefacing du and (iii) turn-final/TCU-final du (not performing a social action on their own, but rather being a part of a TCU of a turn implementing a social action). Our data do not provide any instances of du within TCUs, i.e. parenthetical instances.
In the following sections, we present close analyses of uses of du in different syntactic positions and sequential positions and environments. First, we show that stand-alone du is used as a summons to (re)establish a joint focus of attention (Section 3). Second, we describe how du as a turn-preface, or as part of one, is used in different sequential environments to manage issues of alignment and affiliation (Section 4). Lastly, we focus on turn-final du as a device for indexing heightened involvement and mobilizing affiliation relevance (Section 5).
The transcription follows the GAT 2 conventions (Selting et al. 2011Selting, Margret et 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 12: 1–51.) and is enhanced by Mondada (2018) 2018 “Multiple Temporalities of Language and Body in Interaction: Challenges for Transcribing Multimodality.” In Research on Language and Social Interaction 51 (1): 85–106. for nonverbal conduct.
3.Stand-alone du
In social situations in which the participants do not maintain a joint focus of visual and cognitive attention, vocative du may serve as a summons, with which the availability of an addressee to attend the talk for which s/he is selected as recipient is checked.99.Goffman refers to focused encounters when speaking about “two or more participants in a situation joining each other openly in maintaining a single focus of cognitive and visual attention” (Goffman 1963Goffman, Ervin 1963 Behavior in Public Places. Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. New York: The Free Press., 89; see also Kendon 1990Kendon, Adam 1990 Conducting Interaction. Patterns of Behavior in Focused Encounters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.). This is the case in the following episode which is taken from a reality TV-show. Joe, Bea and Jörg are sitting on couches arranged around a table and maintain an ‘open state of talk’ (Goffman 1981 1981 Forms of Talk. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.). While Bea is checking her mobile phone, Jörg is rolling a cigarette. The participants are asked to talk about a topic written on a card which lies on the table in front of Bea (see Figure 1A). Joe initiates the sequential reestablishment of a joint focus of attention. After his so gets no response (lines 02–03), he uses du to attract Bea’s attention (line 04):
)
01 ((open state of talk))
02 Joe: so;
so
03 (.)#
fig #Fig. 1A
→ 04 <<:-)> DU: +h° he->
du
jörg +shifts gaze to Joe->
05 *(-)
bea *shifts gaze to Joe->
06 Bea: #ja[::?]
yes
fig #Fig. 1B
07 Joe: [THE]+ma?
topic
jörg ->+looks at his hands->
08 (-)
09 er*ZÄHL.
tell me
bea ->*shifts gaze towards card-->>
10 ((laughs, 0.8 seconds))
11 Bea: [ich +erZÄHL #nix; ]
I won’t tell anything
12 Jörg: [( + )]
->+
fig #Fig. 1C
13 Bea: <<reads aloud> lachen ist geSUND;
laughing is healthy
14 aber wO hört der SPASS auf;>
but where does the fun stop
Joe’s du puts upgraded pressure for a response on an addressee (Stivers and Rossano 2010Stivers, Tanya, and Federico Rossano 2010 “Mobilizing Response.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 43 (1): 3–31. ), providing a clear first-pair part of a summons-answer sequence, securing co-presence, and accomplishing joint orientation at turn-beginning (see Deppermann 2013Deppermann, Arnulf 2013 “Turn-design at Turn-beginnings: Multimodal Resources to Deal with Tasks of Turn-construction in German.” Journal of Pragmatics 46: 91–121. ). As a summons, du indexes that a co-participant owes recipiency, which makes it a more analytical attention-getting device than some other means like audible in-breath (Schegloff 1996Schegloff, 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. ; Mortensen 2009Mortensen, Kristian 2009 “Establishing Recipiency in Pre-beginning Position in the Second Language Classroom.” Discourse Processes 46 (5): 491–515. ), pauses and restarts (Goodwin 1980Goodwin, Charles 1980 “Restarts, Pauses, and the Achievement of Mutual Gaze at Turn-beginning.” Sociological Inquiry 50 (3–4): 272–302. , 1981 1981 Conversational Organization. Interaction between Speakers and Hearers. New York: Academic Press.), interjections, or body movements (Mortensen 2009Mortensen, Kristian 2009 “Establishing Recipiency in Pre-beginning Position in the Second Language Classroom.” Discourse Processes 46 (5): 491–515. ; Mondada 2013a 2013a “Embodied and Spatial Resources for Turn-taking in Institutional Multi-party Interactions: Participatory Democracy Debates.” Journal of Pragmatics 46, 39–68. ). The stand-alone du occasions “a visual search procedure by coparticipants to determine from the speaker’s gaze just who the addressed recipient is” (Lerner 2003 2003 “Selecting Next Speaker: The Context-sensitive Operation of a Context-free Organization.” Language in Society 32 (2): 177–201. , 192): Joe’s co-participants interrupt their activities, reorient their gaze to Joe, thus establishing a shared interactional space (Mondada 2009Mondada, Lorenza 2009 “Emergent Focused Interactions in Public Places: A Systematic Analysis of the Multimodal Achievement of a Common Interactional Space.” Journal of Pragmatics 41: 1977–1997. , 2013b 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. ; Kendon 1990Kendon, Adam 1990 Conducting Interaction. Patterns of Behavior in Focused Encounters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.), and display observable recipiency (lines 04–05). The fact that both participants display recipiency demonstrates that du does not specify a particular addressee – although it does ‘indicate’ (Lerner 1996Lerner, Gene H. 1996 “On the Place of Linguistic Resources in the Organization of Talk-in-Interaction: ‘Second Person’ Reference in Multi-Party Conversation.” Pragmatics 6 (3): 281–294. , 2003) that an addressee and a particular participation framework (Goodwin and Goodwin 2004Goodwin, Charles, and Marjorie H. Goodwin 2004 “Participation.” In A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, ed. by Alessandro Duranti, 222–244. Malden, MA: Blackwell.) have been proposed. This makes du (i) less analytical than vocative proper names (Lerner 2003 2003 “Selecting Next Speaker: The Context-sensitive Operation of a Context-free Organization.” Language in Society 32 (2): 177–201. ) or touch and (ii) a more intimate way of summoning because it presupposes co-presence of the participants. We suggest that it is Joe’s gaze which serves as the referential means with which the direction of his talk becomes clear and Bea is singled out as the addressee. (Unfortunately, the image section of the video recording does not indicate the direction of Joe’s gaze at that moment.) By delivering the verbal second pair part ja (“yes”) Bea displays availability for further engagement and ratifies the projected participant framework as well as her participant status as addressed recipient (line 06). In contrast, Jörg withdraws his gaze, shifting it to his manual work and becoming an unaddressed recipient.
All in all, summoning with du initiates the sequential achievement of mutual orientation and the orientation to a shared interactional space, thereby (re-)establishing inevitable prerequisites that allow for the following accomplishment of what Goffman (1963Goffman, Ervin 1963 Behavior in Public Places. Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. New York: The Free Press., 98) calls a “we-rationale”, i.e. a sense of doing a specific activity together (lines 07–14).
4.Du-prefacing
Prefacing turns with du establishes or reestablishes states of being ‘with’ the other as do summons with stand-alone du. However, the interactional accomplishments are critically particularized by the sequential environments and the types of turn, i.e., turn-beginnings that initiate a new action trajectory (Section 4.1), responsive turn-beginnings (Section 4.2), and turn-beginnings that expand a sequence (Section 4.3).
4.1Prefacing turns that initiate a new action sequence
In first position, du-prefaced turns are recurrently used to launch new courses of action. Prefacing with du secures the availability of an addressee, thereby accomplishing an interactional prerequisite for producing the turn already underway. Additionally, du alerts the so addressed recipient that something noteworthy is to come. This can be illustrated by returning to the dyadic telephone interaction between the sisters Tina and Marina presented in the introduction as Extract (1). In the course of the participants’ mutual display of understanding and affiliation, the sequence is brought to a point of possible completion (lines 14–17). At this point, it is not clear what comes next and who will take the next turn. Overlapping with Marina, Tina uses du followed by hesitation markers (“und eh;”, line 18), initiating a topic proffering sequence:
09 Tina: marina das MERKT man SO.
Marina you can notice that
10 ich WEISS [das] wohl ne,
I know that right
11 Marina: [ja;]
Yes
12 ja [das is nich so EINfach du;]
yes it’s not that easy du
13 Tina: [ich mErk das ja AUCH; ]
I realize that too
14 (-)
15 Tina: ne,
well
16 Marina: ne?
isn’t it
17 j[a:;]
yes:
→ 18 Tina: [↑DU] und [eh-]
du and ehm
19 Marina: [ne,]
well
20 Tina: ↓mh=[WIE ] war das jetz nochmAl;=
ehm what happened exactly
21 Marina: [und-]
and
22 Tina =aNIta hatte geschrieben dass die carla
VOLKner tot is,
Anita had written that Carla Volkner is dead
23 Marina: ja nee briGITte; (.)
yes no Brigitte
24 Tina: ach briGITte hat das geschrieben.
oh Brigitte wrote that
With the du-preface, Tina self-selects as next speaker, disambiguates participant roles, and summons her recipient’s attention to the turn to be produced. Subsequently, Marina indeed stops talking and joint orientation is interactively achieved. The beginning of a new course of action is supported by the disjunctive prosody of Tina’s turn-preface. The preface is realized as a contour of its own. It features a nuclear accent on du and a high onset that is significantly higher than the prior turns and especially the turn proper, which shows a low onset (see Figure 2). The prosodic design of the preface supports indexing a sequential disjunction and projecting something new and noteworthy to come (Droste and Günthner 2020Droste, 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.; Rendle-Short 2007Rendle-Short, Johanna 2007 “ ‘Catherine, you’re Wasting your Time’: Address Terms within the Australian Political Interview.” Journal of Pragmatics 39: 1503–1525. ; see also Couper-Kuhlen 2004Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth 2004 “Prosody and Sequence Organization in English Conversation. The Case of New Beginnings.” In Sound Patterns in Interaction, ed. by Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, and Cecilia E. Ford, 335–376. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. , 2009 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. ).
In multi-party interactions, launching new courses of action with du-prefaces requires referential means that make clear to whom the turn is directed. In Extract 9, taken from a dinner-table conversation between the couple Wolf and Beate and their guest Tim, Tim reports about problems buying a table via internet. During his extended recounting, Wolf is noticeably distracted by the flies which are buzzing around the pans, orients towards them, and begins to flick with his hand to make the flies go away (lines 03–05). Tim interrupts his telling when he notices that Beate – although nodding – also visually reorients to the local matter (see Figure 3A). The following pause (line 06) allows Wolf to come in and shift the topic to the intruding object (Bergmann 1990Bergmann, 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.). He reorients toward Beate (Figure 3B) and launches a new course of action. His question “was WOLLT ihr noch Essen,” (“what else do you want to eat”), which features the second person plural pronoun ihr (“you”) treating Beate and Tim as a party, is prefaced with du + first name (lines 07–08).
01 Tim: +Δ*schöner TISCH auch?
nice table too
+looks at Wolf->
beate Δlooks at Tim->
wolf *looks at Tim->
02 (-)+
tim ->+
03 aber *(.) äh- (.)
but erm
wolf ->*gazes towards the pan and the flies->
04 katas+TROphe weil +die hatten eine sysTEMum*stellung,
catastrophe because they had a system relaunch
+looks at Wolf-+looks at Beate->
wolf ->*chases after the flies->
05 hab +Δ#zweimal +ANgerufen beim suppOrt,
called the help-line twice
+looks at Wolf+looks at Beate->
beate Δgazes at Wolf’s flicking hand and nods->
fig #Fig. 3A
06 (0.6)*
wolf ->*
→ 07 Wolf: #*↑du +beAte;=Δ
du Beate
*...orients towards Beate.>
tim ->+looks at wolf->
beate ->Δ
fig #Fig. 3B
08 Δ=was WOLLT ihr #noch +ΔEssen,*
what else do you want to eat
...............-------------,,,,,,,,,,>*
tim ->+looks at the pans
beate Δreorients her body toward Wolf-Δshifts gaze
towards the pans and leans forward->
fig #Fig. 3C
09 *(0.6)#
wolf *stands up and starts clearing away the
dishes->>
fig #Fig. 3D
10 Tim: achso willst REINmachen?Δ
oh I see you want to clear away
beate ->Δ
11 Wolf: ja weil-
yes since
12 hier und da sind alles die FLIEge da-
here and over there are flies all over
13 das:: sOllten wir uns NET so [weisch,]
we shouldn’t you know
14 Beate: [ja ]
dann MACH_S nich,
yes then don’t do it
15 Wolf: das zieht immer MEHR an?
that is attracting more and more
16 (0.8)
17 dann machen wir es eher WEG.
then let’s put it away
18 Δ(0.6)
beate Δreorients towards Tim->>
19 Beate: äh;
erm
20 +(0.8)
tim +reorients towards Beate and pushes his plate away->>
21 naja KLAR, (.)
well sure
22 aber was willsch_de mache;=gell?
but what do you want to do you know
The prefacing with “↑du beAte;”, with its own pitch contour and featuring a high onset, projects a new course of action. It picks out Beate, the host, as intended addressed recipient and elicits her alignment (line 07). The recognizable body reorientations of Wolf’s co-participants toward Wolf show that interactional conditions for recipiency are established. Beate begins to alter her body orientation from Tim towards Wolf and, in doing so, arranges an adequate shared interactional space; Tim also starts to shift his gaze to Wolf. However, Wolf only visually attends to Beate to check whether she reorients to him (lines 07–08; see Figure 3C). Then all three shift their gaze towards the pans and establish joint attention (see Figure 3D). Subsequently, they deal with the matter of taking away the dishes (lines 10–17) before Beate reorients to the prior matter (lines 18–22).
4.2Prefacing responsive turns to questions
In first position, du-prefacing is used to facilitate the smooth start of a new matter by securing the recipient’s attention and, at the same time, to index the heightened significance of what is to follow. In second position, however, a first action has already established the conditional relevance of some specific next action or some range of relevant responses and, thus, both the direction of talk and recipiency have already been secured “as an intrinsic precondition of sequence organizational considerations” (Clayman 2013 2013 “Agency in Response: The Role of Prefatory Address Terms.” Journal of Pragmatics 57: 290–302. , 293). Du-prefaces in second position recurrently occur in question-answer sequences and project a significant sequential departure of the action made relevant by the question (see Rendle-Short 2007Rendle-Short, Johanna 2007 “ ‘Catherine, you’re Wasting your Time’: Address Terms within the Australian Political Interview.” Journal of Pragmatics 39: 1503–1525. , 2011 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. ; Clayman 2010Clayman, Steven 2010 “Address Terms in the Service of Other Actions: The Case of News Interview Talk.” Discourse & Communication 4 (2): 161–183. , 2013 2013 “Agency in Response: The Role of Prefatory Address Terms.” Journal of Pragmatics 57: 290–302. ; Butler et al. 2011Butler, 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. on turn-initial address terms in second position). In the following extract of a skype-interaction between Paula, who lives in Germany, and Benno, who is living in Canada, Paula’s yes/no interrogative “Is=es auch WARM bei EUch?” ‘is it also warm with you’ establishes the relevance of a type-conforming (‘yes’ or ‘no’) answer (see Raymond 2003Raymond, Geoffrey 2003 “Grammar and Social Organization: Yes/No Interrogatives and the Structure of Responding.” American Sociological Review 68 (6): 939–967. ).
01 Paula: Is=es auch WARM bei EUch?
is it also warm with you
02 (-)
03 Paula: sieht so WARM aus;
it looks so warm
→ 04 Benno: du paula JETZT grad- (.)
du Paula just now
05 ich dEnk das Is jetzt schon plus plus FÜNF oder so?
I think it is plus plus five now or something
06 [plus SECHS?]
plus six
07 Paula: [oh o ]kay okay nein;=
oh okay okay no
08 =NICH warm he;
not warm he
09 (-)
10 Benno: leider NICH;
unfortunately yes
11 aber ich mein für hIEr SCHON.[=also-]
but I mean here it is so
12 Paula: [ja; ]
yes
As Benno does not answer (line 02), Paula gives a reason for having asked the question in this way, applying more pressure on him to respond. Benno’s following du-preface does not introduce a straightforward, type-conforming answer to the question. Rather, it alerts Paula to an upcoming departure. Benno reports the temperature in degrees. In this way he avoids confirming the presupposed perspective on the scale embedded in the question and lets Paula infer whether or not it is warm (lines 07–08). Rejecting the polar question design enables him to sidestep the problem of relativity, i.e., that although it might not be warm for the interlocutor, it may indeed be warm for the place and time of year (see lines 10–11).
This kind of indexing of sequential departure is not limited to the projection of non-straightforward turns following yes/no interrogatives. In Extract 11, taken from the telephone interaction between two sisters (cf. Extracts 1 and 8), Tina asks Marina how old was a woman who passed away. After a rather long pause, Marina rejects epistemic priority.
01 Tina: °h wie Alt is die denn geWORden;
how old did was she
03 (0.6)
→ 04 Marina: h° ((labial click)) du äh wAr die nich=ein bisschen Älter als MAma? (.)
du erm wasn’t she a bit older than mum
05 Tina: dat kann wohl SEIN;=
that’s possible
06 =ich WEISS es nich genau;=
I don’t know for certain
07 =dann is die wohl NEUNzig wohl ge/
then she turned ninety
08 öh wohl Über neunzig gewor[den ne?]
oh over ninety, wasn’t she
09 Marina: [ja Über] nEUnzig ne,
yes over ninety
10 Tina: [hm_hm,]
uh hum
11 Marina: [mAma ] WAR_s ja schon.
mum already was
The du prefaces a response that is itself interrogatively formatted, extending its anchorage in the question and indexing uncertainty. Following indications of dispreference (a pause, audible breathing, and labial click), the du projects a departure from the ascription of epistemic priority by the person posing the question.
Co-participants commonly answer questions with du-prefaced responses when sequencing does not run smoothly and the subsequent turn shows some kind of departure from the expectations arising from the prior action. In such sequential environments, du allows for the local enactment of being ‘with’ the other and thereby reduces the interactive risks of the sequential departure.
4.3Prefacing turns that expand an action sequence
A second sequential environment in which du-prefacing is regularly used and the availability of the addressee is not at issue are sequential expansions, when the possibility of disaffiliation is locally relevant. The du-prefaced turn expands the action sequence by anticipating a possible but unarticulated divergent evaluative stance. In the following extract, the sisters Paula and Tamara redecorate Paula’s room. Paula tells Tamara that the type of wallpaper she had when she was young is now available again. She amplifies this by referring to picture-wallpaper consisting of one big photo of a forest (line 02). After answering both Tamara’s question concerning the kind of wallpaper she once had, and her subsequent skeptical request for confirmation (lines 05–09), the sequence arrives at a point of possible completion.
01 Paula: °h *∆#des gibt_s jetz AUCH wieder;=
now it’s available again
>>*prepares the roller
tamara ∆watches Paula preparing the roller
fig #Fig. 4A
02 =dass die ganze wand (.) EIn großes ∆(.) foto
von einem WALD i[s oder so;]
so that the whole wall is one big photo of a
forest or something like that
tamara ->∆
03 Tamara: [hh° ]∆hm_hm,
uh hm
∆looks at Paula->>
04 (0.6)
05 un was hattest DU,
and what did you have
06 *(0.8)
paula *looks at Tamara->
07 Paula: ja diesen #WALD; (.)
yes that forest
fig #Fig. 4B
08 Tamara: echt-*#
really
paula ->*walks towards the wall and starts painting
fig #Fig. 4C
09 Paula: ja-
yes
10 (1.0)
→ 11 du ich fAnd des eigentlich auch SCHÖN-
du I liked it actually
12 ich KANNT es aber auch nich Anders,
but I didn’t know otherwise
13 (-)
14 ich mein meine Oma die würde (0.6) die KRIse kriegen;=
I mean my grandma would freak out
15 =we_ma ihr erzÄhlen (so) sie soll des STREIchen;
if we were to tell her that she should paint that
Tamara’s skeptical request for confirmation allows for the possibility that a negative evaluative stance could be taken towards the wallpaper. Paula’s following du-prefaced turn treats Tamara’s request as an invitation to elaborate by taking a positive stance towards the wallpaper, explaining why she had it, and noting that she was not the only person who liked it at the time (lines 11–15). The du-preface serves as an initial cue to the addressee and signals that the turn-in-progress anticipates a possible or not clearly articulated divergent stance towards the matter. By framing the turn as one dealing with concerns connected with the addressee, the du-preface indexes a willingness to make one’s own position accountable and serves to solicit affiliation.
A similar sequence emerges in Extract 13, again taken from the dinner-table interaction between Beate, Wolf and their guest Tim. Tim informs his recipients that in his new apartment the landlady will be living in the flat above him. His information is receipted only reluctantly (lines 03–04). By continuing the sequence with the disclaimer (Hewitt and Stokes 1975Hewitt, John P., and Stokes, Randall 1975 “Disclaimers.” American Sociological Review 40 (1): 1–11. ) that she is very discreet (lines 05–06), he treats the subsequent pauses and minimal acknowledgments as cues which indicate negative evaluative stances and elaborates on his stance towards the matter.
01 Tim: *jetz hAm=wir aber die vermIEterin Δ+oben DRÜber;+
but now we have the landlady upstairs
+looks at Beate--+
beate Δlooks at Tim->
wolf *looks at his plate->>
02 +(0.6)
+looks at Wolf->
03 Beate: oh +JA, (.)Δ
oh yes
->Δ
tim ->+
04 Wolf: h[m; ]
hm
→ 05 Tim: [aber] DU, (-)
but du
06 die is sehr dis+KRET; Δ(.)
she’s very discreet
->+looks at Beate->
beate Δlooks at Tim->
07 Tim: [also +die Δis die/]
well she’s she
->+
beate ->Δ
08 Beate: [ja das DENK ][ich/]
yes I think (so)
09 Tim: [du ]+die is WIRKlich+Δ
(-) auch- (.)Δ
du she’s also really
+looks at beate-+
beate ->Δ
looks at Tim-Δ
10 also wIrklich keine +dumme +ΔFRAU, (.)
well really no stupid woman
+looks at Beate+
beate Δlooks at Tim->
11 die is [wirklich disKRET; ]
she is really discreet
12 Beate: Δ[nei:n. ]Δ
no
->Δshakes her head-----Δ
13 (-)
14 Tim: und und koRREKT auch Δwie ichs erLEBT hab; (.)
and and also respectable has been my experience
beate Δlooks at Tim->>
15 Beate: ja;
yes
Tim’s disclaimer is prefaced by the adversative conjunction aber (“but”) and du. Serving as an index of an adversative stance, this preface lends Tim’s assessment of his landlady a quality of “‘doing’ speaking from the heart” (Clayman 2010Clayman, Steven 2010 “Address Terms in the Service of Other Actions: The Case of News Interview Talk.” Discourse & Communication 4 (2): 161–183. ; Günthner 2016Günthner, 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. ; see also Couper-Kuhlen and Selting 2017Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth, and Margret Selting 2017 Interactional Linguistics. Studying Language in Social Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.). In doing so, Tim orients to a possible upcoming divergent stance towards the landlady and makes his own position accountable so as to maintain affiliation. Subsequently, Tim continues to provide increased effort in support of his positive stance towards his future landlady (lines 07, 09–11, 14),1010.To deal with the overlap and ‘survive’ in the turn, Tim restarts several times and finally uses du in prefatory position (lines 07, 09). Much like restarting (Goodwin 1980Goodwin, Charles 1980 “Restarts, Pauses, and the Achievement of Mutual Gaze at Turn-beginning.” Sociological Inquiry 50 (3–4): 272–302. , 1981 1981 Conversational Organization. Interaction between Speakers and Hearers. New York: Academic Press.), this form of du-prefacing summons his co-participants’ (especially Beate’s) orientation to speaker’s turn (see also Rendle-Short 2007Rendle-Short, Johanna 2007 “ ‘Catherine, you’re Wasting your Time’: Address Terms within the Australian Political Interview.” Journal of Pragmatics 39: 1503–1525. , 1513; Butler et al. 2011Butler, 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. , 350). Subsequently, joint orientation to the turn is achieved as Beate ‘drops out’, namely stops talking (line 07), and establishes a state of mutual gaze (see Deppermann 2013Deppermann, Arnulf 2013 “Turn-design at Turn-beginnings: Multimodal Resources to Deal with Tasks of Turn-construction in German.” Journal of Pragmatics 46: 91–121. ). which is acknowledged by multiple affiliative responses (lines 08, 12, 15).
5.Turn-final du
Participants do not only rely on du as proper turns or turn-prefaces, but they also use du turn-finally and TCU-finally. Such post-positioned uses of du recurrently occur in environments in which stance-taking and affiliation is made interactively relevant (see also Droste and Günthner 2020Droste, 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.). The following extract is taken from the telephone interaction between the sisters Marina and Tina presented above as Extracts (1), (8) and (11). Marina has informed Tina about her husband’s illness and conveyed her personal stance that he has overstrained himself, reporting that she had reminded her husband of the fact that he is too old to do certain things (lines 05–06). After Tina responds by emphatically affiliating with Marina’s position (lines 07–10, 13), Marina extends the sequence with a confirmation “ja das is nich so EINfach du;” (“yes, it’s not that easy du”; line 12).
01 Tina: ja nee dem der muss sich wIrklich mehr RUhe antun;
yes he surely needs more rest
02 Marina: MUSS der auch;
he really has to
03 der KANN [das auch/]
he can that
04 Tina: [ja::: ][:::::; ]
yes
05 Marina: [ich hab ihm auch gesacht;]
I told him as well
06 ich sag du bist keine DREIßig mehr,
I said “you aren’t thirty anymore”
07 Tina: nee; (.)
yes
08 n=das- (.)
and that
09 marina das MERKT man SO.
Marina you can notice that
10 ich WEISS [das] wohl ne,
I know that right
11 Marina: [ja;]
Yes
→ 12 ja [das is nich so EINfach du;]
yes it’s not that easy du
13 Tina: [ich mErk das ja AUCH; ]
I realize that too
14 (-)
15 Tina: ne,
well
16 Marina: ne,
isn’t it
17 j[a:;]
yes:
With the turn-final du, Marina retroactively demonstrates heightened involvement and commitment to her preceding personal statement. Du indexes affiliation with Tina, and contributes to the ratification of experiential sharedness, perspectival convergence and social symmetry.
However, it is difficult to determine whether turn-final du is a vocative indicating an addressee or a pragmatic marker.1111.For Mandarin, Biq (1991)Biq, Yung-O. 1991 “The Multiple Uses of the Second Singular Pronoun ni in Conversational Mandarin.” Journal of Pragmatics 44: 929–957. describes similar forms of ni as addressing a participant role not an individual. In contrast, Bladas and Nogué (2016)Bladas, Òscar, and Neus Nogué 2016 “ ‘Que bé tu!’: An Emerging Emphatic Use of the Second Person Singular Pronoun tu (you) in Spoken Catalan.” Pragmatics 26 (3): 473–500. argue that similar forms of Catalan tu are not vocatives at all but interjections. Tackling this issue in dyadic interactions like Extract 14 is especially difficult. The following extract is again taken from the triadic dinner table interaction between Wolf, Beate and their guest Tim (Extracts 9 and 13). Wolf asserts that he is “extremely full” and will refrain from eating. His turn as well as the two subsequent confirming assertions are tagged with du (by Beate; line 02 and himself; line 04).
→ 01 Wolf: *+Δ#ich bin schon super SATT +du;
I’m extremely full du
*>>gaze toward his own plate->>
beate +>>gaze toward Wolf’s plate-+shifts gaze to pan->>
tim Δ>>gaze toward his own plate->
fig #Fig. 5A
→ 02 Beate: ich Δ#kann AU=Δnich mehr #du;=
I cannot anymore either du
tim ->Δshifts to Wolf’s plateΔshifts to his own plate->>
fig #Fig. 5B #Fig. 5C
03 =also;
well
→ 04 Wolf: heut=is schon (KRISse) du;
today it’s pretty wicked du
05 (-)
06 Tim: ja;
yes
There are no indications that the instances of turn-final du are last-ditch efforts to retroactively secure the attention of an addressee. Furthermore, the instances of turn-final du do not single out an addressee as there are no additional cues (e.g. gaze) which help to clarify to whom the turns are directed (see Figures 5A, 5B, and 5C). Wolf’s first turn in line 01, seems to be pointedly directed to both Beate and Tim. Du rather adds to the pressure on the recipients to respond, preferably with affiliation (see Stivers and Rossano 2010Stivers, Tanya, and Federico Rossano 2010 “Mobilizing Response.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 43 (1): 3–31. ). After Wolf’s turn followed by du (line 01), Beate shifts her gaze to the pan and responds with an assertion that matches Wolf’s position, treating his state of ‘being full’ as a mutual position grounded in shared experience (line 02). The echoed du indexes her commitment to the congruent position, adding to the co-construction of affiliation. Wolf confirms the “congruency of perspectives” (Schütz and Luckmann 1973Schütz, Alfred, and Thomas Luckmann 1973 The Structures of the Life-World. London: Heinemann.) by expanding the sequence with an agreeing assessment followed by a further du (line 04). The turn-final du reinforces the interactively constructed affiliation and simultaneously invites further affiliation (note Tim’s following confirmation of Wolf’s position; line 06).
The extract shows that du is barely a recipient indicator. Instead of functioning as a vocative, it rather works more like a turn-final pragmatic marker, inviting and displaying agreement and convergence.
6.Discussion
This paper has analyzed non-prototypical, vocative uses of the second person personal pronoun du in everyday interaction. We have shown that vocative du is a resource for the management of being ‘with’ the other in terms of alignment as well as affiliation. However, the ways speakers actually employ du, are critically dependent on the syntactic and sequential contexts in which it is used. Our analyses of individual cases have shown contextual particularizations in a variety of syntactic and sequential environments. When recipiency is not ensured, stand-alone du provides a vocative device to summon the intended addressee and achieve joint orientation for focused interaction (Section 3). Within focused interaction, vocative du facilitates smooth interaction and perspectival congruence. Du-prefacing allows participants in interaction (i) to establish joint orientation to and project the significance of new courses of action and topical matters, (ii) to index departures from those expectations arising from prior actions, and (iii) to index the anticipation of divergent stances (Section 4). In environments in which the calibration of stances becomes locally relevant, post-positioned du is not employed as a vocative but as a pragmatic marker, which indexes a strong commitment to the preceding action and displays and/or solicits affiliation (Section 5).
The analysis presented here suggests the importance of linguistic resources such as du for the situated work of establishing joint orientation and maintaining affiliation in everyday interaction. Verbally displaying that you are ‘with’ someone, thereby eventually reducing the risks of threatening social solidarity, addresses issues at the heart of social togetherness and sociability (see Goffman 1971 1971 Relations in Public. Microstudies of the Public Order. New York: Basic Books.; Lindström and Sorjonen 2013Lindström, 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.). We have shown that this work is done interactively, moment-by-moment, by participants, in and through turns and sequences. However, it is not du itself that accomplishes the variety of actions but its deployment in specific sequential and syntactic positions within the temporal unfolding of turns and sequences (see Deppermann and Günthner 2015Deppermann, 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.; Deppermann and Streeck 2018Deppermann, Arnulf, and Jürgen Streeck (eds.) 2018 Time in Embodied Interaction. Synchronicity and Sequentiality of Multimodal Resources. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. ). Our analysis demonstrates that the context-sensitivity of linguistic resources such as du reaches far beyond their use as shifters. Thus, in order to gain a better understanding of resources such as du, systematic analyses of their situated occurrence within turns and sequences are a sine qua non.
Acknowledgments
We thank two anonymous referees for valuable comments and suggestions on an earlier version of the paper. Thanks to Lisa Roebuck for checking the use of English.
Notes
).; Androutsopoulos 1998Androutsopoulos, Jannis 1998 Deutsche Jugendsprache. Untersuchungen zu ihren Strukturen und Funktionen. [German youth language. Investigations of its structures and functions.] Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.). In the following, we refrain from addressing this issue. investigation of shifts between T-forms and V-forms in Peruvian Spanish, showing that participants rely on these resources to accomplish important elements of identity in the service of social action., 89; see also Kendon 1990Kendon, Adam 1990 Conducting Interaction. Patterns of Behavior in Focused Encounters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.)., 1981 1981 Conversational Organization. Interaction between Speakers and Hearers. New York: Academic Press.), this form of du-prefacing summons his co-participants’ (especially Beate’s) orientation to speaker’s turn (see also Rendle-Short 2007Rendle-Short, Johanna 2007 “ ‘Catherine, you’re Wasting your Time’: Address Terms within the Australian Political Interview.” Journal of Pragmatics 39: 1503–1525. , 1513; Butler et al. 2011Butler, 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. , 350). Subsequently, joint orientation to the turn is achieved as Beate ‘drops out’, namely stops talking (line 07), and establishes a state of mutual gaze (see Deppermann 2013Deppermann, Arnulf 2013 “Turn-design at Turn-beginnings: Multimodal Resources to Deal with Tasks of Turn-construction in German.” Journal of Pragmatics 46: 91–121. ). describes similar forms of ni as addressing a participant role not an individual. In contrast, Bladas and Nogué (2016)Bladas, Òscar, and Neus Nogué 2016 “ ‘Que bé tu!’: An Emerging Emphatic Use of the Second Person Singular Pronoun tu (you) in Spoken Catalan.” Pragmatics 26 (3): 473–500. argue that similar forms of Catalan tu are not vocatives at all but interjections.References
Address for correspondence
University of Münster
Institute of German Studies
Department of Linguistics
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D-48143 Münster
Germany
[email protected]Biographical notes
Pepe Droste is a PhD candidate at the Institute of German Studies, University of Münster. His main research interests are Conversation Analysis, Interactional Linguistics, grammar, and multimodal interaction. His core work focuses on the use of address terms in face-to-face interaction.
Susanne Günthner is professor of German Linguistics at the University of Muenster, Germany and Honorary Professor of Xi’an International Studies University (XISU) in China. Her work focuses on Interactional Linguistics, analyses of communicative genres, comparative analyses (German-Chinese) and Anthropological Linguistics. Her recent research projects include grammar and interaction, contrastive analyses of Chinese and German interactions, doctor-patient-interactions. She is co-editor of the series Linguistik – Impulse & Tendenzen at de Gruyter.