PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

Studies on diatopic variation in the German-speaking area are numerous, but pragmatic phenomena have rarely been examined so far. This paper is devoted to the use of vocatives in Germany, Austria, and German-speaking Switzerland from a pluriareal perspective. A questionnaire study with production and rating tasks is used to investigate which areal differences can be observed in the use and evaluation of onymic forms of address (such as personal names, pet names, or kinship names) and syntactically disintegrated pronouns. In addition, the role of sociolinguistic and pragmatic factors in the use of vocatives is examined. It is found that vocatives are used more frequently in the south of the investigated area and that their use decreases towards the north and within Germany towards the east. Also, the combination of pronoun + name (‚du, Urs‘) is observed only in the south. Furthermore, it appears that the use and positive evaluation of vocatives increases with age and that vocatives are mainly used to mitigate the face threatening nature of requests and apologies. However, there is no evidence of diatopic differences in the evaluation of vocatives.