Terms of address in Russian family etiquette: Semantics and pragmatics.

The paper describes a fragment of speech etiquette: forms of address prevailing in family communication in Russian culture are studied. The description is based on the analysis of questionnaires developed by the authors and fi lled out by about 450 respondents. Special attention is paid to the distribution of names and kinship terms as forms of address. It is proposed to distinguish three types of families – patriarchal, democratic, intermediate – with different rules of such distribution. The authors introduce a concept of pragmatic shift. Types of pragmatic shifts while addressing are described as well as family communication strategies which stipulate them.