Open Access

Carolina Flinz, Laura Herzberg, Eva Gredel

• The adequate use of social deixis is highly dependent on the situation and context and has therefore always been at the center of linguistic pragmatics. So far, principles of pronominal address have mainly been modelled with a focus on oral, co-present interaction. The use of pronominal address in computer-mediated communication (CMC) with its translocal and partially anonymous contexts is still a research gap. This paper asks, from a contrastive perspective, how the appropriate use of address pronouns is negotiated on talk pages of the German, French, and Italian Wikipedia. The talk pages of Wikipedia share features of CMC genres such as a dia logic structure and an informal writing style with non-standard language. There are two types of Wikipedia talk pages, whose data are considered in this study based on the multilingual corpora by the Leibniz Institute for the German Language: article talk pages, where authors negotiate online encyclopedic content, and user talk pages, where the contributions of individual authors are discussed. These two types of talk pages will be analysed for the study. Based on corpus data, it can be shown that the unidirectionality of this transition from the formal form (in German: Sie, in French: vous, in Italian: Lei) to the informal form (in German: du, in French: tu, in Italian: tu) in CMC is not always given. In both analysed Wikipedia subcorpora, i.e., the Wikipedia article talk pages on the one hand and the article talk pages on the other hand, a greater deal of discussions about addressing styles takes place on the user talk pages, with the informal you variant being discussed more frequently than the formal you variant. Aspects of pronominal address among speakers of German, French and Italian are characterized by instability and uncertainty – especially in CMC. Moreover, it can be shown that Wikipedia authors discuss, among others, the reasoning behind their preference for a certain form as well as the notion of “distance” in which informal variants show familiarity which is not perceived as desirable by all users.