With this workshop INAR is marking something of a milestone. At five, has the network reached maturity? If not that, this 5th anniversary at least is an occasion for some reflection. This paper uses the opportunity to speculate about INAR’s possible future ‘programme’. It builds on a paper I gave at the INAR03 conference in College Station, Texas, which presented a brief exploration of the relationship between politeness and politeness theory on the one hand, and address on the other, and which highlighted three areas where politeness researchers may have missed some of the insights gained by address research over the years. But it failed to do the reverse and identify areas where address researchers could benefit from a better understanding of politeness research. Here I want to delve deeper into the address-politeness relationship and consider these issues further and more deeply. Kerbrat-Orecchioni’s work on interpersonal relations and politeness (Kerbrat-Orecchioni 1992) provides an interesting framework for studying the address-politeness relationship. Her (and others’) recent contributions on nominal forms of address and how they are used in different languages (Kerbrat-Orecchioni ed. 2010, 2015) highlight the benefits both of contrastive studies of address practices, and of a greater attention to nominal address forms and their interaction with address pronouns. The aim of my paper is no more than to encourage a debate about the future directions of address research and the types of research questions we will want to pose.

References

• Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Catherine. 1992. Les interactions verbales II. Paris: Armand Colin.
• Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Catherine (ed.) 2010. S’adresser à autrui. Les formes nominale d’adresse en français. Chambéry: Université de Savoie.
• Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Catherine (ed.) 2015. S’adresser à autrui. Les formes nominale d’adresse dans une perspective comparative interculturelle. Chambéry: Université de Savoie.