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Pré-publication, Document de travail Année : 2023

How and why choosing the wrong form of address may make you look like a boomer or a Karen: Characterological figures on social media

Résumé

In T/V languages, address choice is a highly sensitive communicative choice. As the social media team of the Deutsche Bahn (DB), the German railway company, decided to address their customers with the informal pronoun of address du (T-form) on Twitter, users reacted heavily, either by welcoming the shift or by harshly opposing it (Truan 2022). The practices analyzed in this paper thus combine two sociolinguistic phenomena that have often been considered rather separately until now: forms of address and characterological figures or stereotypic personae (Agha 2003; Agha 2005). Specifically, I argue that address forms function as a first-order index, through which a linguistic form (T-form or V-form) indexes the persona of someone compliant to an unmarked, deferent way of addressing others (users of the V-form), or, on the contrary, of someone adhering to more relaxed Internet communicative norms (users of the T-form). When those usages become noticed and metapragmatically linked to one or the other persona, a second-order index is established—which is what happens when Twitter users comment on the reactions following the tweet from the Deutsche Bahn. Finally, when, through a process of enregisterment (Agha 2003; Agha 2005), the V-form and the T-form become objectified, they also become metapragmatically linked to stereotypic personae. As this third-order index becomes visible, using the formal V-form Sie and engaging on a metapragmatic debate on its necessity on social media becomes indexed and re-enregistered with two interrelated yet distinct personae: the boomer and Karen.
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Dates et versions

halshs-04306731, version 1 (25-11-2023)

Licence

Paternité - CC BY 4.0

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  • HAL Id : halshs-04306731 , version 1

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Naomi Truan. How and why choosing the wrong form of address may make you look like a boomer or a Karen: Characterological figures on social media. 2023. ⟨halshs-04306731⟩
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