[Lingtyp] addressing the daughter as Mummy

[Jess Tauber]

Dunno if thie is relevant, but here goes. In the 2005 movie version of War
of the Worlds, the main character (a 30-ish divorced father of two children
who have just been dropped off at his place by their pregnant, remarried
mother), who doesn't get along with his teenage son, is given advice by
their 10 year old daughter 'That's not how you're gonna get through to
him'. The father replies to her, somewhat sarcastically: 'Who are you, your
mother, or MINE?'

Jess Tauber

On Wed, Sep 9, 2020 at 9:37 AM Alan Rumsey <Alan.Rumsey at anu.edu.au> wrote:

> Sorry for the delay in my uptake of this thread, which hadn’t come to my
> attention till today. The so-called ‘address inversion’ is indeed an
> interesting phenomenon, which is very widespread, as shown by the postings
> so far, and by the discussion in Braun 1988, which attests to its existence
> in Albanian, Arabic, Bengali, Bulgarian, Greek, Hungarian, Italian,
> Norwegian, Persian, Romanian, Russian, Tok Pisin, and Turkish. I have
> written about it in the Papuan language Ku Waru in a forthcoming
> publication that can be find online here
> <https://www.dropbox.com/s/99udauo9zz82ilj/Rumsey%20%20-%20EE%20%26%20Centering%20of%20subjectivity%20-%20Feb%202019.pdf?dl=0>
> (pp. 13-16). One of the points I make there is that the term “address
> inversion” is actually a
>
> misnomer, since, in great majority of attested practices of this kind,
> there is actually not a full inversion. That is, while the senior party
> uses the term for the junior one that the latter uses for him or her, the
> junior party does not change his or her usage in the opposite direction.
>
>
>
> Alan
>
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