“Help me move to that, blood”. A corpus-based study of the syntax and pragmatics of vocatives in the language of British teenagers

This study focusses on the use of the most common vocatives in the language of British teenagers and adults. Taking a corpus-based approach, it seeks to establish whether these vocatives are more frequent in the language of one group of speakers than in the other, and if so, what reasons might account for this. Also addressed is the position of vocatives in the utterance and the relation between position and pragmatic meaning. The final section looks in more detail at man and bruv/blood since these are among the most widespread and remarkable recent forms to emerge. Findings indicate that vocatives are clearly more frequent in the speech of British teenagers than in that of adult speakers. As expected, the majority of these items occur in final position. Regarding pragmatics, they serve a wide variety of functions, both interpersonal (summoning attention, creating solidarity among the speakers) and/or discourse-related (topic and turn management). We even find cases of more than one used in the same turn, and also examples of their metalinguistic use in reported speech. Finally, some of these vocatives have generally lost their deictic reference to the addressee, or may even adopt features of another category, such as pronouns, as in the case of man. •Familiarisers should not be regarded only as simple terms of address but also as discourse or pragmatic markers.•Familiarisers are very common in the expression of young speakers where they often serve to reinforce group identity.•Man, brother, mate and boy are the most common in London teen talk, while in the language of adults only man and brother have any sort of popularity.•The findings here confirm that the position in the C-unit of these forms is directly associated with their pragmatic function.•Tweets provide interesting additional material although the control of users' and contextual variables is an obstacle.