Addressing non-acquaintances in Tunisian Arabic: A cognitive-pragmatic account

The literature on terms of address (TofA) abounds in both sociolinguistics and pragmatics. Mostly, sociolinguistics explains them with rank and age (Trudgill 1983; Wardhaugh 1986; Fasold 1990; Holmes 1992; Romaine 1994) and pragmatics with politeness (Brown and Levinson 1987). Furthermore, TofA are mostly studied as occurring between acquaintances that know about the social rank and age of each other to produce the address that is most coherent with the context of situation. The present study focuses on TofA used in addressing non-acquaintances, i.e., people who have never met one another before. Evidence from Tunisian Arabic (TA) shows that TofA as used with non-acquaintances are not motivated by rank and politeness as much as by the addresser's drive to create familiarity and minimize distance with the addressee. Such a pragmatic minimization of distance is not noticed when TofA are used with acquaintances. Speakers of TA inject kinship-related terms in their address to non-acquaintances in view of creating rapprochement between the speaker as a deictic center and the addressee in the periphery Such a rapprochement is made possible through the manipulation by the speaker of the FAR-NEAR schema (Johnson 1987) related to the CENTER-PERIPHERY image schema. The paper intends to show this taming of addressees by studying TofA in TA through Lakoff's (1982, 1987) theory of categorization known as Idealized Cognitive Models (ICMs).