Original scientific paper
CHANGES IN COMMUNICATION: VERBAL GREETINGS IN THE ITALIAN LANGUAGE
Vesna Deželjin
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Hana Klak
; Croatian Communication Association, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
Greeting is a basic act of communication in which a person intentionally makes his/her presence known to the others, but at the same time it is also a way to show attention toward a person greeted. By greeting we reveal a type of relationship (usually cordial) which exists between people as well as social status (formal or informal) between individuals or groups of people coming in contact with each other. Greetings can be verbal or non-verbal, and the choice between the two depends upon a series of factors, such as culture, situation and relationship between persons that exchange greetings. Verbal greetings are generally short, fix linguistic expressions whose components usually cannot be additionally elaborated or substituted by some other element. However, our experience shows that greetings change and only for some inner linguistic factors. The paper discusses the results of two surveys. One survey was conducted in 2006 among high-school seniors in four Italian towns, located in geographically and linguistically different positions, who represented the young language speakers. The second survey, dated in 2013, was done among students of two Italian Universities, one in the North and the other at the border between central and southern Italy, who, being aged between 20 and 24, should not be treated as young speakers according to the scholars. Concerning greetings that our examinees wrote into questionnaires, the descriptive analysis of the presented data, among other things, shows that these two groups do not differ so much as far as their social status is concerned (University students vs. high-school students), but for other reasons. Accordingly, we noticed that speakers of the same geographic origin and sex, even if they belong to different age groups, use same greetings.
Keywords
greeting; verbal communication; variation in verbal greetings
Hrčak ID:
176496
URI
Publication date:
15.10.2016.
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