Vol. 57 No. 2 (2009)
Research Article

Power, Politeness, and the Pragmatics of Nicknames

PDF
  • Michael Adams
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1179/175622709X436369

Published 2009-06-01

Copyright (c) 2009 Maney Publishing

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

Abstract

Nicknames distribute power within a social group: they can be imposed, or they can be used by agreement between namer and named. This is not the difference between political and apolitical uses of nicknames: agreement is a political act, the result of social negotiation, in which the nickname is a token. Agreement is a matter of pragmatics and politeness, so a theory of nicknames and nicknaming depends on the pragmatics of nicknames and the politeness structures implicated in them, rather than conventional logico-semantic accounts of names. Negotiation of social power within the constraints of speech acts and maxims of politeness leads to iterations of “naming contracts” between named and namer, such that nicknames are politically focusing social objects.

PDF

References

  1. Adams, Michael. 2008. “Nicknaming, Interpellation, and Dubya’s Theory of the State.” Names 56.4 (December): 206–220.
  2. Alia, Valerie. 2007. Names and Nunavut: Culture and Identity in Arctic Canada. New York: Berghahn Books.
  3. Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics 4. New York: Cambridge University Press.
  4. Evans, Gareth. 1973. “The Causal Theory of Names.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. Supplementary Volumes 47: 187–208.
  5. Fellows Jensen, Gillian. 1968. Scandinavian Personal Names in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag.
  6. Goffman, Erving. 1967. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face to Face Behavior. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
  7. Holland, Theodore J. 1990. “The Many Faces of Nicknames.” Names 38.38 (December): 255–272.
  8. Kripke, Saul. 1972. “Naming and Necessity.” In Semantics of Natural Language, ed. Donald Davidson and Gilbert Harman. Dordrecht: D. Reidel,253–355.
  9. Lakoff, Robin. 1973. “The Logic of Politeness; or, Minding Your P’s and Q’s.” In Papers from the Ninth Regional Meeting [of the] Chicago Linguistic Society, ed. Claudia Corum, T. Cedric Smith-Stark, and Ann Weiser. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society, 292–305.
  10. Leslie, Paul L., and James K. Skipper. 1990. “Toward a Theory of Nicknames: A Case for Socio-Onomastics.” Names 38.38 (December): 273–281.
  11. Morgan, Jane, Christopher O’Neill, and Rom Harré. 1979. Nicknames: Their Origins and Social Consequences. London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
  12. Saeed, John I. 2003. Semantics. 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
  13. Searle, John. 1969. Speech Acts. New York: Cambridge University Press.
  14. Searle, John. 1983. Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind. New York: Cambridge University Press.
  15. Stainton, Robert J. 2004. “The Pragmatics of Non-Sentences.” In The Handbook of Pragmatics, ed. Laurence R. Horn and Gregory Ward. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 266–287.
  16. Vanderveken, Daniel. 1990. Meaning and Speech Acts. Volume 1: Principles of Language Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.