Words for grandparents

[Beverly Flanigan]

And don't forget Big Daddy in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"--though he may not
have been a grandfather (can't recall).  Is the term common in the South?

At 07:35 PM 10/20/00 -0500, you wrote:
>With all the attributions of "Nana", "Papaw", and other terms for
>ancestors of the second ascending generation (there goes the
>anthropological kinship specialist!), there has been only one brief
>mention of an alternative term for grandfather -- and no comment on one
>speech community where it is widely used.
>
>In Chicago varieties of African American vernacular, many people use
>"Big Daddy" as the term of choice for "grandfather".  I don't know of
>any good way to be precise in pinning down frequencies for the
>distribution of terms like this. I'll stick with an impressionistic
>statement: "Big Daddy" is widely recognized to mean "grandfather", but
>markedly fewer speakers use the term when talking about their own
>relatives.  Those who normally don't use the term for members of their
>own family are conveying other meanings when they say "Big Daddy".  For
>them, it clearly implies that there's something funny about the position
>of this specific grandfather in relation to his grandchil(ren).  ("Now
>look at this Big Daddy here!") The jocular intent of using the term the
>term often is underlined by clear marking in supersegmental elements.
>(E.g., the spread of tones is broadened -- high tones go higher, low
>tones lower than the speaker's base speech pattern.)


_____________________________________________
Beverly Olson Flanigan         Department of Linguistics
Ohio University                     Athens, OH  45701
Ph.: (740) 593-4568              Fax: (740) 593-2967
http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/linguistics/dept/flanigan.htm