Introduction

The two areas of linguistics that are currently most concerned with comparisons between languages are typology and contrastive pragmatics. The first focuses on what can be ascertained about human cognition from the range of differences between languages, mainly at the morphosyntactic, semantic and phonological levels. The second relates to how different cultures utilise language as an instrument of action; there is an ever-increasing number of contrastive pragmatic studies, involving many languages. This study, exploring as it does the range of ways in which human relations are expressed through the choice of address terms over a number of languages, combines aspects of typological and pragmatic approaches. It also considers variation in the functions of modes of address in the context of social change. Among the issues that interest us are how speakers report on:

1. the ways in which they negotiate particular address choices;

2. variation and change in address practices across the generations;

3. the ways in which distinct address patterns develop in different domains and institutions;

4. modes of address in electronic communication, such as chat groups and email communication;

5. address practices in pluricentric languages, that is, languages which have several national varieties, such as German in Germany and Austria;

6. address practices in language contact situations.

This chapter provides the theoretical and methodological background for the subsequent chapters in which the results of our empirical study are outlined.