Addresing one another in intimate discourse

The paper presents an analysis of forms of address in ORTOFON, the newest corpus of spontaneous spoken Czech, which is balanced in terms of gender, education (higher–lower), age (18–35, 36+) and 10 dialectal regions of childhood residence. In Czech, forms of address are signaled by grammatical means — the vocative case. Relevant instances were thus identified and divided into three groups: given names — mostly informal variants (hypocorisms), family member names and other common nouns. The conclusion mentions additional types of contact-establishing devices which are characteristic of face-to-face conversations. The corpus being balanced, it is possible to track the preferences for different forms of address in terms of sociolinguistic backgrounds. This is especially true for family member names, which are amply represented in the corpus.