ervin & tripp question
Ervin-Tripp article question | Mike McDonald | March 12th, 2003
If anyone has recently read the Ervin-Tripp article that accompanies Unit 1of IIC, they may remember the flow charts for address systems in various cultures. To see how they differed, I took about half a dozen people from my environment and ran them through the charts. Interestingly, the results were significantly different for the 19 th -century Russian system on the one hand and the Yiddish and Puerto Rican systems on the other. For example, I would address my sister with the V-form in 19-century Russia, since we live in different households.
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to work out how the chart for the American address system (p. 219) works. For example, let's say I want to find out how to address a younger policeman I've never met before and whose name I don't know. The questions go as follows:
ADULT? Yes
STATUS MARKED SETTING? No
NAME KNOWN? No
At this point I'm unsure of what to do. I presume I should take the left branch, mysteriously marked "FRIEND OR COLLEAGUE", but this leads back to "STATUS MARKED SETTING". If we assume that the arrow should be pointing to "IDENTITY SET" rather than "STATUS MARKED SETTING", I have to address the policeman by his last name, which I don't know.
Can anyone set me straight?
Mike McDonald
Re: Question about Ervin-Tripp article | Thomas Bloor | March 12th, 2003
Mike,
I think you have pinpointed a weakness in Ervin-Tripp's diagram. The situation you describe (addressing a younger policeman that you do not know) might fit Ervin-Tripp's category of "identity set" (i.e. one where his role as policeman is significant). In fact, I suspect that in this situation I would use zero address, which I think is usual for Brits in most situations. I assume that the policeman is relating to you in his professional capacity; otherwise the fact that he is a policeman is irrelevant. But, even though it is not necessarily in an obviously status-marked setting such as a courtroom, etc (see E-T's examples), the fact that the cop in question is dealing with you on a professional basis makes for a comparable setting. In that case if you didn't use zero address and don't know his name, you would probably be expected to address him as "officer" or "inspector" or some such, in other words by his title minus LN (which you don't know). His age and yours are immaterial (unless you are a child); he is a policeman and you are a suspect/victim/witness/etc.
Ervin-Tripp doesn't mention policemen in this context, but does give examples of priest, physician, dentist, and judge. The discussion in the text is a little more enlightening. She points out (not very clearly but I think I am reading it right) that social group practices differ in the use of e.g. "Professor without LN" (the text I have reads "within LN", but I don't see what else she can mean here.) The diagram (Fig 1 An American address system) is misleading (wrong?) in that every outcome except one includes a name; the exception is restricted to children even though "name not known" is an option for adults too. In fact, the minus exit on "name known" for adults leads straight to "identity set", which leads exclusively to outcomes that include names.
I have never lived in the US but I have worked a lot with Americans in other countries, taught a lot of Americans, seen a million American movies, and read masses of American fiction, and my impression is that titles without last names are somewhat more frequent in American usage (as in many European cultures, cf. Italian "profesore', "ingeniere', etc) than in British; eg US "counsellor" as a term of address to lawyers even outside the courtroom (of course, this particular term isn't used at all in UK address and we don't have so many lawyers), "officer" to policemen, and "professor" or even "doctor" to academics (a practice that Ervin-Tripp rules out for herself and her colleagues but not for all Americans.
Brits occasionally address a medic as "doctor" and also a nurse as "nurse" without including LN but certainly never an academic or a dentist. "Judge" is not a title in UK, but only a job, and it is not used as a term of address with or without LN, though as in Ervin Tripp's account "Your Hono(u)r" is required in court.. Of course, movies and TV may be misleading and zero address might be almost as common in USA as in UK, where it is certainly the usual favoured option. Ervin-Tripp's account of what she and her social group of academics do corresponds pretty well to my own and colleagues' practice, I think. Some "Title minus LN" address forms that do occur in UK are "Vice-Chancellor", "Dean" (in universities); "Prime Minister"; andI think I have heard "Chair" (replacing the obsolescent Mr/Madam Chairman).
Ervin Tripp's diagram obviously doesn't give the whole picture, but I am disinclined to be too hard on her for that because I once tried to do something very similar in an article I published obscurely in 1981, and I found it virtually impossible to get it 100 per cent right. The article was called "Kinship address in Midlands English" and I probably own the only extant copy though there was a short book published in Chinese and English, in which my approach was applied to Chinese kinship (Qu Yanping 1990 (?) Interdiscourse: a Step Beyond Interlanguage. Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press. Children must address a police officer as "uncle police officer" or "auntie police officer", but that still doesn't solve your problem.
Best
Tom
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