Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2008
Pronouns and terms of address in interviews, letters, and speeches in Neues Deutschland reflect a variety of address norms. They depend on the participants' social status, geographic origin, party membership, and other factors, and show pronoun avoidance in a number of cases. Sociolinguistic methods applied to written texts can thus reveal possible changes in address norms in the German Democratic Republic. (Sociolinguistics, text linguistics, pronouns of address, language in the German Democratic Republic)