A Comparative Study of Address Forms in English and Persian Social and Political TV Talk Shows Broadcast by VOA and Press TV

The way people exchange information or address one another has attracted the attention of researchers all around the world. This study endeavored to compare the address terms used in Iranian and American social and political talk shows in English. To reach the goals of this study, a corpus which included Iranian and American English address forms was selected. The address forms used in this study included recorded digital files of authentic TV talk shows, both Iranian and American through the use of digital receivers to observe them deliberately for address forms. The data of this study derived from observation of spoken discourse. Based on the classification of address forms by Manjulakshi (2004), a new classification developed by the researchers to identify different address forms in this corpus. As the results showed, the overall examination of the address terms provided in this study makes it clear that Iranian address terms are relatively formal and culturally, socially and politically loaded. In American address terms used in political and social talk shows, terms such as personal names are widely used. This may be indicative of the fact that Americans in media, as in society, prefer to be less formal. The findings of this study can be used by curriculum and material developers to consider aspects of cultural differences in different contexts of situation.