Terms of address in everyday interactions between older female friends and acquaintances

Abstract

This article explores conversational patterns of community-residing, older women in Cyprus, focusing on terms of address (ToA) in everyday, naturally-occurring conversations of a long-standing friendship group, and their acquaintances, all aged 62 to 78 years old. Data include eighteen hours of self-audiorecorded conversation, supplemented by ethnographic interviews and extensive participant observations. Quantitative and micro-analytic perspectives, especially membership categorization analysis, as well as some insights from politeness theory, are combined in the analysis of ToA, with the aim of investigating explicit and implicit references to age and other categories. The analysis focuses on various address terms, from more formal (e.g., title plus first name) to high-solidarity terms resisting age categories, typically used to address same-age or younger female interlocutors. It looks how these how these ToA are employed in a number of interactions, including impromptu meetings with one or two close friends, planned meetings of larger groups of friends, and conversations with acquaintances. The choice of terms is explained in the first instance in terms of solidarity and age differences, with more distant acquaintances and members with larger age gaps using more formal ToA. Chronological age is an important but insufficient predictor for the use of more reverential or distancing ToA. The interactional history of the participants also plays a significant role in deciding between different ToA (and lack thereof), as well as older participants' strategies of rejecting the reception of distancing ToA. Finally, young-age categories (e.g., ‘girls’) functioning as ToA are analyzed. These terms appear mostly in formulaic greetings or in directives with the function of redressing dispreferredness of directive. Rather than invoking membership in young-age categorizations, these young-age ToA function, in this context, as an in-group marker.