How Alignment Patterns Of Friendship Is Realized With The Use Of Familiar Terms Of Address In Friends

As prior research on terms of address has not provided a unified functional analysis, I have drawn from various approaches and studies, among which are face and politeness theory and alignment patterns. There is a general agreement that terms of address have a relationship maintenance function, and my analyses show how they play a part in the negotiation of the friendship between these six friends in Friends. A survey of the contexts in which first names and endearments are used in the Friends corpus produces five categories: 1) greeting and parting rituals, 2) apologies, 3) requests, 4) comfort/support, and 5) knowledge displays.The qualitative study of interpersonal uses of direct address found in my data is partially comparable to the functional categories established in McCarthy and O'Keeffe's (2003) quantitative corpus study. Their relational category includes direct address with greetings and leave-takings, a pattern confirmed in my research. Their second interpersonal category, mitigators, subsumes all forms of direct address redressing face-threats:According to McCarthy and O'Keeffe (2003), direct address in the local context of apologies, requests, comfort and knowledge displays can thus be categorized as mitigators. However, it is argued that close friends do not orient so much towards the public social value in Brown and Levinson's (1987) notion of face, but towards more private issues such as affection.Aside from contributing to areas of investigation within the field of linguistics and more particularly discourse analysis, this study also has implications for the investigation of friendship relations. Though I have studied a fictional friendship network, my analyses show that friendship is best conceived of as a dynamic process-more specifically a process of striking a balance between alignment and disalignment. Furthermore, my categorizations of the contexts—greeting and parting rituals; apologies; requests; comfort and knowledge displays in which specific alignment practices occur are crucial sites for the investigation of the friendship process..