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Semantics, Which They Called Power and Solidarity

This document discusses how social factors influence language use, specifically address forms and pronouns. It summarizes the influential 1960 study by Brown and Gilman which proposed that pronoun usage is governed by power and solidarity semantics. Power refers to social status differences while solidarity refers to intimacy between individuals. The study found that while European languages originally used pronouns primarily to express power differences, solidarity now dominates as the most important factor. Address systems can vary between languages, communities, social groups, and individuals. The document also provides an overview of the key concepts of the ethnography of communication, including speech communities, situations, events, and speech acts.

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Oana Barbu
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104 views

Semantics, Which They Called Power and Solidarity

This document discusses how social factors influence language use, specifically address forms and pronouns. It summarizes the influential 1960 study by Brown and Gilman which proposed that pronoun usage is governed by power and solidarity semantics. Power refers to social status differences while solidarity refers to intimacy between individuals. The study found that while European languages originally used pronouns primarily to express power differences, solidarity now dominates as the most important factor. Address systems can vary between languages, communities, social groups, and individuals. The document also provides an overview of the key concepts of the ethnography of communication, including speech communities, situations, events, and speech acts.

Uploaded by

Oana Barbu
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
Available Formats
Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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SPEECH as SOCIAL INTERACTION Perhaps the most obvious point where social factors influence language is in the selection

of address forms. People are using language in subtle ways to define their relationship to each other, to identify themselves as part of a social group. In most languages there are two main kinds of address forms: names and second person pronouns. English speakers have it easy compared to speakers of most languages in the world. Speakers of French, German and Italian have to make a choice. These languages have two forms for you; one is for people who deserve deference because their social status is above the speakers or because the speaker does not have a close personal relationship with them The other one is used for people who are close to the speaker, or of lesser social standing. The most influential study of address forms was published by Brown and Gilman in 1960. They proposed that pronoun usage was governed by two semantics, which they called power and solidarity. The power pronoun semantic, like the power relationship is nonreciprocal because two people cannot have power over each other in the same area. In the same way, the power semantic governs the non-reciprocal use of the two pronouns. The less powerful person says V (the term Brown and Gilman use to designate the deferential pronoun in any of the languages, taking the first letter from Latin vos) to the more powerful one and receives T (the familiar pronoun from Latin tu). The basis of power are several. Older people have power over younger people, parents over children, employers over employees. The power semantic would be sufficient only if a society were so finely stratified that each individual had an asymmetrical relationship with every other individual; in other words, there were no power equals. Since this was never the case a residual rule for power equals was necessary. This rule called for the reciprocal use of the same pronoun between power equals. Not all differences are connected with power, so a second semantic, the solidarity semantic developed. Two people can be equally powerful in the social order, but be from different families, come from different places, and be in different, equally respected professions. In other words, the need developed to distinguish a degree of common ground between people which went beyond simply having equal power.

Solidarity implied a sharing between people, a degree of closeness and intimacy. The relationship was inherently reciprocal; Whenever the solidarity semantic applies, then, the same pronoun is used by both people. According to Brown and Gilman European dual second person systems originally expressed power primarily and solidarity only secondarily. Now, solidarity dominates power as the semantic that is most important in selecting T or V. Several studies make it clear that the application of the power and solidarity semantics can vary substantially not only from language to language, but from one community to another and from one social grouping to another in the same community. Furthermore, it is clear that there are even differences from one individual speaker to another. American and English Address The address system of American-English, in particular, has been analyzed by Brown and Ford (1961/64) and by Ervin-Tripp (1972). The principal choices in American-English are between first name (FN) and title with last name (TLN), with FN roughly analogous to T, and TLN to V. The three patterns that are possible (according to Brown and Fords study) with the two forms are: the mutual exchange of FN (including such common nicknames as Bob or Jim); the mutual exchange of TLN (with Mr., Mrs., Dr., and so on, as the titles); the nonreciprocal patterns in which one person gives FN and gets TLN. According to Brown and Ford, the two reciprocal patterns are governed by a single dimension, ranging from acquaintance to intimacy. Americans call someone they are merely acquainted with by TLN and expect the same in return. People who are friends call each other by FN. But Brown and Ford point out that the difference between relationships for Americans is very small. Five minutes conversation is often enough to move from a TLN relationship to a FN one. The Ethnography of Communication. To understand what the ethnography of communication is all about, it is necessary to understand some fundamental concepts. A central concept is the speech community. Speech community is difficult to define, but most ethnographers would agree that it refers to a group of people who share the same rules and patterns for what to say, and when and how to say it.

Each individual speaker can belong simultaneously to several speech communities (a college student might be a resident of a particular dormitory, a student at a particular college, a black person, and an American, at the same time). The units of interaction that Hymes proposed as the focus of ethnographic study include the situation, event and act. Situations are general settings, such as a party, in which communicative events, like conversations, can occur. Within events, speech acts occur, such as asking a question.

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