A Corpus study on the negotiation of pronominal address on talk pages of the German, French, and Italian Wikipedia

The adequate use of social deixis is highly dependent on the situation and context and has therefore always been at the center of linguistic pragmatics. So far, principles of pronominal address have mainly been modelled with a focus on oral, co-present interaction. The use of pronominal address in computer-mediated communication with its translocal and partially anonymous contexts is still a research gap. In this context, it is particularly interesting that different digital platforms have developed specific customs or netiquettes regarding the appropriate use of address pronouns. This paper asks, from a contrastive perspective, how the appropriate use of address pronouns is negotiated on talk pages of the German, French, and Italian Wikipedia. The corpus study is based on the multilingual Wikipedia corpora of the Leibniz Institute for the German Language.