Addressing People by Name in Russian: A Corpus Study

Abstract

In Russian, there are many ways to address a person by name. For instance, a man called Aleksandr may be addressed as Aleksandr, Aleksandr Ivanovic, Sasa, Sasen?ka, Saska, Sanja, etc. This study aims at analyzing the use of various strategies of naming the listener throughout the last two centuries. It uses the data from the Russian National Corpus to establish the direction of change in address patterns and combines a statistical approach with a manual inspection of selected examples