Address Variation in Sociocultural Context

Book excerpt: This study looks at the sociocultural context of five Italian regions and at the situational context of restaurant encounters (a sub-type of service encounters) to examine address variation in spoken Italian—with a focus on singular address pronouns tu, voi and lei. It offers a thorough examination of distance and power dynamics between waiters and customers in a wide range of restaurant types. This book marks the introduction of Italian to the field of regional pragmatic variation and it will be of interest to linguists, Italianists and researchers more broadly working on service encounters. The author offers a new dimension to the understanding of social interaction and language use in contemporary Italy, uncovering cultural and linguistic differences between even adjacent geographical areas within a modern European nation state.