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Article published In: Linguistics in the Netherlands 2022
Edited by Jorrig Vogels and Sterre Leufkens
[Linguistics in the Netherlands 39] 2022
► pp. 39–54

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Pronouns of address in recruitment advertisements from multinational companies

 | Radboud University
 | Radboud University
 | Radboud University
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with Radboud University Nijmegen.

Published online: 4 November 2022
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https://doi.org/10.1075/avt.00060.har
Abstract
In Netherlandish Dutch, Belgian Dutch, German, French, and Spanish, speakers have a choice between formal (V) and informal (T) pronouns of address. We present a quantitative study of how V and T are used on recruitment pages of multinational companies. Our corpus-based method is inspired by studies on pronouns of address in Netherlandish and Belgian Dutch by Vismans, Roel 2007. “Aanspreekvormen in Nederlandse en Vlaamse personeelsadvertenties voor hoogopgeleiden”. Tijdschrift Voor Taalbeheersing 29(4): 289–313.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar and Waterlot, Muriël 2014. “Aanspreekvormen in Poolse, Nederlandse en Vlaamse onlinepersoneelsadvertenties voor hoogopgeleiden”. Neerlandica Wratislaviensia 241: 115–132.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar. Unlike these earlier studies, we provide a comparison of the same companies recruiting in different countries, thereby strengthening the comparison of V- and T-forms between languages. We find a preference for T in recruitment ads in Belgian Dutch, Netherlandish Dutch, and Spanish, while we find a preference for V in French. There seems to be no clear preference for either V or T in German, which may reflect that address preferences in German are changing or ambiguous.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
  • 3.Method
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Open data
  • Note
  • References
References (25)
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2024. The (Lack of) Salience of T/V Pronouns in Professional Communication: Evidence from an Experimental Study for Belgian Dutch. Languages 9:3 ► pp. 112 ff. DOI logo
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2024. Can You Make a Difference? The Use of (In)Formal Address Pronouns in Advertisement Slogans. Journal of International Consumer Marketing 36:2 ► pp. 99 ff. DOI logo
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2024. What I Can Do with the Right Version of You: The Impact of Narrative Perspective on Reader Immersion, and How (in)Formal Address Pronouns Influence Immersion Reports. Languages 9:8 ► pp. 265 ff. DOI logo

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