INAR 3

On 9 and 10 October 2015, the third INAR conference took place, INAR3 (check also #INAR3). INAR stands for International Network on Address Research. Address as a concept for linguists includes second-person pronouns ('you'), names, titles ('professor'), honorifics ('Mr') etc. These are all tools that language users deploy to manage social relations. INAR's activities largely straddle the linguistic sub-disciplines pragmatics and sociolinguistics, and there is also a strong historical (socio-) linguistic interest.

INAR was launched during a workshop in the summer of 2013 in Berlin, followed by one in Hildesheim a year later  (whose website  is no longer available) the following summer. There was also an INAR colloquium during the 20th Sociolinguistics Symposium in Jyväskylä in the same year. There is of course an excellent INAR website with details of more events, the first INAR publication, a volume of papers from the 20th Sociolinguitics Symposium colloquium edited by Catrin Norrby and Camilla Wide, has just been published by Palgrave, and John Bejamins now has a book series, Topcs in Address Research (TAR), whose first volume should appear in 2016. So in the space of less than three years, INAR has achieved a great deal that this informal network can be very proud of.

INAR3 was the first edition in the western hemisphere, with the Department of Hispanic Studies at Texas A&M in College Station (in, yes, Texas) as host. It's a long way to go from Sheffield, but well worth it because Irene Moyna and her team put on an excellent conference. The bare facts: there were 30 papers, many covering specific languages (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, the Spanish-based creole Palenquero, Vietnamese), others focusing more on general issues but with data from Dutch, English, the Slavonic languages (Bulglarian, Polish, Russian). Quite a few papers dealt with different forms of computer-mediated communication (CMC; especially Facebook, but also WordReference) and some were more theoretical (e.g. discussing the idea of address as a modal operator, politeness theory, Natural Semantic Metalanguage or NSM). Two papers dealt with language acquisition: one on teaching Spanish as a foreign language, the other on name learning and retrieval. According to the participant list, 39 people representing universities from 13 countries took part in the conference (attending in person and/or contributing to papers) and four papers were presented by video links from Canada and Australia.

All the papers were of course very high in quality, but I particularly enjoyed hearing American colleagues' perspectives on address, because the two previous editions of INAR had been attended by only a small number of them. Surveying the programme, it becomes clear immediately that a major concern of address researchers in the USA is Spanish. This is not surprising, as Spanish is the second most widely spoken language in the country and also the most widely studied language at schools, universities and colleges. Plus, there is a remarkably wide and interesting range of variation in the use of address pronouns in Spanish, especially in Latin America. A further noticeable feature of this conference was the fact that a good number of papers dealt not with the pronouns of address, but with various nominal forms of address in a wide range of settings, such as the Aboriginal hip-hop community, the gay community and the (sometimes very entertaining) minutes of a local ladies' club over four decades in the 20th century. 

Address is clearly a popular area for graduate students to explore. It was great to be able to listen to so many impressive, enthusiastic younger researchers with innovative ideas. Especially impressive were two undergraduates from the University of Manitoba who gave their presentations with great confidence and panache by video link. The future of INAR seems assured.

Small conferences like this, focuses on a very specific area, are an excellent sources of inspiration for future research. So what has inspired me to do further stuff? Two things spring to mind. Terrell Morgan and Scott Schwenter from The Ohio State University pointed out that we have been neglecting the use of plural address pronouns. They have quickly discovered that the plural of usted in everyday Spanish is much more likely to be vosostros than ustedes, despite the fact that most learners' grammars and text books assume a parallelism between the singular and plural informal and formal pronouns. And, yes, on reflection I'm sure that something similar can be said about Dutch jullie and u in addressing more than one person. The other is the methodology used by Hanna Lappalainen and her colleagues in Helsinki. They used cardboard cutouts of well known Finns to study address practices, inviting ordinary people in the street to ask these celebrities if they could take a selfie and recording these requests. The carrot for their participants was a selfie with the cutout. Now there's a plan for the next paper: INAR4 is in 2017 in Helsinki.