A Compertative Study Of Address Terms in Persian and English

In cross-cultural situations, choices of address terms often reflect cultural differences.Contrastive analysis of address terms are worthy of study, since different cultures use variousaddress terms.This study aimed to investigate differences and similarities between addressterms used in English and Persian languages. In this study the usages of address terms arecollected from 12 English and Persian movies which are considered to better reflect socialreality by portraying various interpersonal relationships in different situations. The data ofthis study is classified based on the Braun’s ( 1988) model of address terms classification.Due to the gathered data of the study,this claasification has gone under some little changesand thus consist of 9 groups. The statistical comparison of these groups between persian andEnglish languages is the prominent part of the study. Among 586 address terms obtainedfrom watching 12 persian and English movies, 302 address terms belong to persian languageand 284 ones belong to English. Frequency of address terms of these two languages havebeen compared in 9 different groups of address terms. These frequencies are demonstratedby means of frequency tables and graphs.The research also demonstrated that there aredifferences and similarities regarding functions of address terms in these two languages.

Keywords:

cross cultural , address terms , frequency tables , functions