Introduction of investigation

Introduction of investigation 


I chose to investigate names and terms of address after reading Richard Hudson's article on the online English and Media magazine. He describes how every name and term of address has a different social message and I want to discover whether people perceive this to be true. Grice's maxims of conversation link to this argument; Grice's maxim of quality states that we shouldn't portray information for which we have no evidence, does this mean that by calling someone by a title without first asking them what that title is would be flouting a maxim of conversation? I wanted to look deeper into this idea so I chose to investigate the hypothesis 'people's positive face needs are effected when they are being referred to by the wrong title'. To investigate this I used a questionnaire in which I will find out how/when people are offended by being called the wrong title (if at all).