A linguistic study of forms of address in Kuwaiti colloquial Arabic

Abstract

The thesis is a descriptive analysis within a sociolinguistic framework of forms of address in Kuwaiti colloquial Arabic. The thesis consists of four main parts and three appendixes. Part One is devoted to an account of the social and linguistic background, methods of data collection, followed by a chapter on theoretical and methodological sociolinguistic principles. This part ends in a chapter on morphological, collocational and colligational preliminaries. Sociolinguistic and morphological principles have been put to a test of illustrative material of Kuwaiti Arabic to see which principles are valid, as a prelude to constructing a framework for the description of Kuwaiti Arabic address-forms. Determining principles of description have been linguistic (phonological, morphological (i. e. in terms of root and schema), collocational and colligational) and socio-cultural (including situational or domain-bound forms and personal, i. e. depending on the status and role-relationships of interlocutors. Part Two deals in greater detail with the description of different address-forms such as kin-terms, personal names, teknonyms, patronyms, nicknames, etc. which are used in the Family Domain. Part Three deals with modes of address regularly observed in the Domain of Social Activities, such as "courtesy formulas", "forms of reproach" and "forms of imploring". It has been found that the two dimensions of "solidarity" and "power" are determining criteria in the choice of reciprocal and nonreciprocal modes of address. Part Four deals primarily with "respectful addressforms" in the Work Domain. These have been found to comprise "respectful idiomatic formulas", "titles", "occupational names" as well as other forms available for command/request distinctions, such as imperatives, declaratives, tag-questions, etc