Quelques emplois discursifs des noms de parenté en général et de papa, maman, en particulier

Abstract

This paper is devoted to some discursive operations of kinship nouns: anaphoric uses with a third person possessive (in possessive anaphora such as a man… his father) or a definite article (in associative anaphora as a family… the father) and uses we call “situational”, i.e. both their uses as address terms and uses – with or without a first or second person possessive – in which they refer to the speaker’s or interlocutor’s father, mother, etc. Among the kinship nouns, nouns like dad, mom, grandpa, auntie, etc., described as “childish”, “loving” or “familiar” in dictionaries, have mainly naked uses, i.e. without a determiner. These naked uses are various, since kinship nouns do not require a determiner neither in their situational uses nor in their anaphoric uses. Depending on the context, dad will refer to “my father”, “your father”, “his/her father” or even “the father (of some family)”. A more specific study of anaphoric uses of dad, mom, etc. – their naked uses as well as their uses with a possessive determiner or a definite article – will allow us to emphasize the characteristics of these kinship nouns, characteristics that are not just the variations suggested by the labels “childish”, of “affectionate” or “familiar”.

Keywords

• kinship nouns
• associative anaphora
• possessive anaphora
• address terms
• conversational chains