The pragmatics of kin address: A sociolinguistic universal and its semantic affordances
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper focuses on an understudied sociolinguistic variable – the use of proper names as opposed to kin terms in address. We present findings from a survey of 80 speech communities that reveals a striking regularity in the way these two noun‐phrase types are used. Where kin terms alternate with names in address, kin terms are always used for senior kin and names for junior kin. The strong cross‐cultural uniformity of this alternation is not easily accounted for by reference to culture‐specific language ideologies, but neither is it explained by proposed universals of politeness. We argue that the referential and semantic properties of kin terms and names motivate culturally grounded, but convergent, conceptualizations of kin terms as honorific and names as anti‐honorific. Our study suggests that the relationship between linguistic forms and sociolinguistic functions may be language‐‘internally’ constrained in such a manner as to be subject to substantive comparative investigation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".