‘Mother’, ‘wife’ and ‘friend’: semantics and pragmatics of an address

Abstract

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 nuanced semantic traits. The metaphor of family is extended into a broader social context and can transcend societal boundaries to enter the realm of abstraction. The cluster model by George Lakoff, which allows for the coexistence of transfer models in secondary usage, is suggested as a tool to describe the pragmatics of addressing a person as a 'mother'. However, unlike Lakoff's works, this study applies the cluster model not to idealised cognitive models — those of birth, genetics, upbringing, and others — but a system of the usage of the word 'mother' as a term of address encompassing diverse metaphorical transfer.