[Lingtyp] addressing the daughter as Mummy

[Mark Donohue]

In Japanese, talking to small boys, you hear people use the pronoun boku
'1SG.M' to refer to the addressee?

Boku wa doko e iku?
1SG.M TOP where ALL go
'Where are you going?'
(said by an elderly female speaker to a young boy)

-Mark

On Thu, 20 Aug 2020 at 14:27, Uni KN <frans.plank at uni-konstanz.de> wrote:

> I think this is technically known as “address inversion”.  I remember work
> on this by Winfried Boeder focusing on the Caucasus (Über einige
> Anredeformen im Kaukasus, Georgica 11, 11-20, 1988, and probably
> elsewhere), and it’s covered in a book by Friederike Braun, Terms of
> Address (Mouton de Gruyter 1988).
>
> Frans
>
> > On 12. Aug 2020, at 21:34, Sergey Loesov <sergeloesov at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Dear colleagues,
> >
> > In various cultures (those I know of happen to be mostly Islamic) the
> form of address can be copied by the addressee. Thus, when a daughter
> addresses her mother as “Mummy”, the mother often reciprocates, saying to
> the daughter something like “yes, Mummy”, or “what, Mummy…” (Same of course
> with a son and his father.)
> >
> > In particular, I came across this kind of exchange in my fieldwork with
> Kurdish (Kurmanji) and some contemporary Aramaic varieties in Upper
> Mesopotamia and Syria, but this phenomenon is also current in the Soqotri
> language, an unwritten Semitic language spoken on the Socotra Island in the
> Indian Ocean, southeast of Yemen.
> >
> > Are we aware of explanations for this kind of usage? Are there
> cross-language studies of this kind of facts?
> >
> > Thank you very much!
> >
> > Sergey
> >
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