title use in academic settings

[Laura Miller]

This discussion about address terms is very interesting, particularly the way it reflects so many different local practices, individual backgrounds and idiosyncratic preferences, such as Hal's aversion to LN. In my undergraduate classes at Loyola I got into the habit of addressing students by LN plus the Japanese address term -san, which is inclusive of Mr, Mrs, Miss, Ms (LN + T). I started doing this not because it so nicely avoids labeling women by age or marital status, but because I find it much easier to remember them by their family names, which are incredibly diverse, rather than their first names, which are not (so many Kimberlys, Jessicas and Amandas!).

I was chastised by a sociology colleague for doing this, because she claimed that by using their last names I am imposing a degree of social distance and not demonstrating intimacy. But the students like it. I've overheard them use it to refer to others outside class ("Do you know what Patel-san did?), and they think it's sort of exotic and cool.
Best,
Laura

>>> "Harold F. Schiffman" <haroldfs at ccat.sas.upenn.edu> 07/24/03 08:52 AM >>>
Alan,

The way you ended your last message, with last-name only (which I was
tempted to start this message with, but can't bring myself to do) reminded
me of British and other traditions, where LN only was (or is) de rigueur.
I could never get used to this, because in the US, at least, it is used
almost exclusively in the military, in other para-military organizations
(e.g.  the US Post office) and of course, reciprocally by (male)
co-equals, but especially in sports.  (One of my female students, also an
athlete here at Penn, told me that women "jocks" do this as well.)  Since
I had worked in the Post office for 2 summers and 2 Xmases and came to
loathe LN address (never reciprocal) from supervisers, I can't bear it
when I hear it from British academics, or others.  (I once had a Tamil TA
whose husband was on the faculty, so she assumed she should address me
with LN; I couldn't bring myself to tell her it was inappropriate in the
US, since it would then bring forth endless apologies and groveling, so I
had to ask the students to break it to her gently).  Her response (to
them) was that it was British usage, which she assumed, and continued to
assume, was appropriate in the US.

Hal Schiffman

On Thu, 24 Jul 2003, Alan Rumsey wrote:

> At 07:53 AM 7/23/2003 -0700, Alexandra Jaffe wrote:
> >
> >At the same time as reciprocal TLN may have been indexing shared
> >membership in a community of high-powered scholars (downplaying internal
> >status hierarchy) it surely also served to differentiate that community
> >from other academic communities that used the (normative) Dr. or
> >Professor. The choice of less hierarchy-laden terms acted as a powerful
> >assertion of high status in the broader field of American Universities
> >precisely by downplaying the need for display of power.
>
> Perhaps so, but from the feedback I have received on my posting it is clear
> that there is a lot of diversity in this respect among US campuses, and
> perhaps even among fields and departments in them. Nor do all of the
> 'elite' ones have reciprocal T+LN as the norm. One of my informants says of
> Harvard in the sixties that:
> those in the rank of "Instructor" (post-Ph.D. but the entry-level
> appointment) were listed in the catalogue as well as addressed as "Dr.
> ...," thus making it an identifiable low-[man-]on-totem-pole designation.
> Then people were listed, described, and sometimes even addressed [!] by
> rank, "Assistant Professor So-and-So," "Associate Professor So-and-So"
> [then a tenured position, by the way], and "Professor So-and-So" [now the
> only tenured rank, instructor being now a pre-Ph.D. rank as elsewhere]. It
> was refreshing to learn, on a scholarly visit when an undergraduate, that
> Yale called everyone "Mr."
>
> Meanwhile, down the road: "MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics in the
> old WWII wooden buildings [where Chomsky was based] was indeed the FN club
> par excellence", bearing out my surmise that this is where the reciprocal
> FN usage came to Chicago Linguistics from.
>
> Another informant reports that at Antioch College in the early sixties,
> faculty were addressed as Mr. and Mrs., rather than "Doctor" or Professor,
> but this usage was not reciprocally used by faculty when addressing
> students, for which first names were used instead.
>
> And another ex-Chicago grad student reminds me that of course, reciprocal
> TLN was not used (with a straight face anyway) by students when talking to
> each other, but only between faculty and students, thereby distinguishing
> that as a special kind of interaction.
>
> All of this once again bears out Ervin-Tripp's point (in the paper referred
> to by Mr. Schiffman) that
> that the range of pragmatic entailments that develop around such
> alternations can be a lot more complex and highly ramified (and, I would
> add, a lot more locally specific) than you might expect, given the small
> number of contrasting terms involved.
>
> Rumsey (ah, but that's another one again)
>
>
>