Address Terms in American Soap Operas. A Corpus-based Study

Abstract

The purpose of this project is the study of vocatives, more particularly, familiarizers in the language used by speakers in American soap operas. By the term familiarized as is “Hey, man, what are you doing?”, “You are so kind, bro”, “I do not Know why we lost that match, boy”, it is to understood a form, separated from the rest of the sentence by commas [or not], to attract other people’s attention or to emphasize the person to whom the speaker of the sentence is taking to [Leach 1999]. Moreover, familiarizers ussualy adopt the form of a Noun Phrase [Huddleston 1984: 224] and their contrast with honorifics as is sir, madam, doctor, etc. For the objective of the work I will use of a corpus based methodology analyzing different terms extracted from the Corpus of American Soap Operas. By doing this, I will be able to contrast the different uses of these address forms. Apart from the before mentioned uses, I will also focus on their main syntactic features, position in the clause and pragmatic functions. As regards the structure of the project, it will be divided into two parts. A first theoretical part, where I will be dealing with main characteristics of these forms according to the literature, and a practical part that will allow me to see if there is a correlation between grammar theory and the use of these terms in American Soap Operas