The paper 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 estate agents servicing four socio-economically different areas of a city in northern England. In the experiment, female participants from eight different regional British and ethnic minority groups, indexed by accented speech and ethnic personal names, requested an appointment to view a house or apartment for sale listed on an online real estate platform.

Quantitative results show that vocative use in service telephone interactions 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.

Qualitative analyses focused on the interpretive frameworks cued by the use of vocatives in the sequential order of the interaction, in speech act realization, and through nonreciprocal use. This analysis revealed, first, that vocatives, while being a prima facie means of personalising the service encounter (Friginal 2009; Hultgren & Cameron 2010; Hultgren 2017), are at the same time used as a strategic means for controlling the sequence of the service encounter through controlling topic and turn management. In this way, estate agents make use of the pragmatic functions of vocatives as they have been described for a variety of institutional and non-institutional types of talk (e.g. Leech 1999; McCarthy and O’Keeffe 2003; Rendle-Short 2010; de Lopez 2013; Kleinknecht & Souza 2017). Second, it was found that variation in vocative type use within individual calls serves the agent to shift and re-allocate unilaterally participant footing during the interaction. In these contexts, in particular endearments take on an interpersonally charged steering function in agents’ management of calls: they serve to mark phases of the service encounter as being unequivocally under their control and at their discretion as well as to shut down deviations from the conventional sequence of the transaction. With this ‘shut up’ function estate agents are able to reclaim and maintain control over the interaction - by making use of the overt ‘friendliness’ and ‘solidarity’ meaning of the endearment (Culpeper & Gillings 2018) and its more covert meanings of diminution and non-reciprocity (Wolfson & Manes 1980; Poynton 1990) to explicate an asymmetrical relationship between themselves and the caller for the purpose of transactional control.

References

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