‘Mother’, ‘wife’ and ‘friend’: semantics and pragmatics of an address
This article explores the semantic and pragmatic features of the word 'mother' when used as a term of address. It examines secondary uses of the term in literary texts from the 1780s to the present, a sample of 4,272 tokens, alongside dictionary definitions. The study revealed that, in different communicative situations, the term 'mother' can convey a range of sometimes contradictory attributes such as 'patronage', 'superiority', 'dependency', 'strictness', 'kindness', 'overfamiliarity' and other...
