| This thesis addresses how social-psychological factors of closeness and distance govern the speaker's selection of terms in three different parts of the grammar: kinship terms, second person pronouns and addressing/naming terms. Using markedness theory, this study isolates the linguistic opposition in each part of the grammar. Markedness characterizes members of the linguistic opposition in terms of morphological and semantic complexity. In addition, it evaluates the property that governs the two terms of an opposition. Research on this subject reveals that the speaker's perception of psychosocial distance is a semantic abstraction encoded independently in each of the three different areas of the grammar of address terms. Psychosocial distance is also the property governing the markedness opposition in which intimacy is evaluated as the typical, unmarked member of the opposition and distance, the property of absence of intimacy, them marked member. This paper provides a case study of psychosocial factors in human interaction being linguistically encoded in the opposition of language. |
