Creating Pseudo-intimacy through Vocatives in Indonesian TV Show

Abstract

Vocatives, closely related to "addressing terms", are used to create pseudo-intimacy between participants of speech events, not only in everyday conversation, but also in media interactions, such as talk show. This paper presents a corpus-based analysis on the forms and functions of Indonesian vocatives used by female and male hosts, each hosting one of two popular talk shows in Indonesia, i.e. So Imah Show (with the female host) and Just Alvin (with the male host). The analysis is based on 12,746-word corpus of one episode for each of the two talk shows. The results show that the female host predominantly uses a politer form to her guests, namely the [kinship terms + first name full form] pattern; meanwhile the male host prefers a solidarity form, namely the [first name full form] pattern. Concerning the functions of the vocatives, both hosts use their preferred vocative forms mostly to maintain pseudo-intimacy, compared to the summoning attention, and addressee identification. These findings indicate that male and female, given their roles as hosts in the context of media interaction, show formal variations in maintaining pseudo-intimacy, in which the female host tend to be politer than the male host. This bias is hypothesised to be influenced by different politeness strategies used by each host, considering the age of their guests.