Using a corpus of recordings of French and British service encounters, which were made as part of a contrastive study, the paper will look at the nominal forms of address used by participants in English and French. The paper will adopt an approach that owes a large theoretical and methodological debt to Kerbrat-Orecchioni’s work on forms of address (Kerbrat-Orecchioni 2010, Kerbrat-Orecchioni 2014). The paper will mostly analyze the function of nominal forms of address such as madame/monsieur in French, and sir/madam in English, focusing on sequences of interactions in which these forms appear. Other English forms such as mate or love, which appear less frequently in the data, will also be discussed. The paper will consider the function these forms play in relation to the speech acts alongside which they appear. The type of responses they trigger, and the type of pronouns they are normally combined with, will also be taken into account. Finally, the paper will consider the potential for misunderstandings of these forms. Misunderstandings might occur when the seemingly identical interpersonal value attached to these forms is transferred from one language to the other.

References

• Kerbrat-Orecchioni,. S’adresser à Autrui : Les Formes Nominales d’adresse En Français. Vol. Langages. 8. Université de Savoie, 2010. https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01393359.
• Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Catherine. S’adresser à Autrui: Les Formes Nominales d’adresse Dans Une Perspective Comparative Interculturelle. Vol. 2. Collection : Langages. Université de Savoie, 2014. https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01477762.