Address inversion in Swahili: Usage patterns, cognitive motivation and cultural factors

Address inversion occurs in many languages of the world and involves figurative use of kinship terms in the “reversed” meaning. In pragmatically defined contexts, a son can be called ‘daddy’, a daughter ‘mummy’, etc. The article explains general cognitive mechanisms underlying this widespread linguistic behavior, drawing parallels to other strategies based on opposition and used to express positive emotions. A detailed case study of Swahili will demonstrate that the phenomenon of address inversion is best understood, when a cognitive analysis takes into account a full sociolinguistic and cultural context. In addition, variation observed in Swahili usage patterns of address inversion provides insights into paths of semantic change which some kinship terms have undergone evolving into general words of endearment or discourse markers. The article contributes to cognitive linguistic research on emotions and words of endearment, and to studies on polysemy of kinship terms. The results shed light on general issues of language-culture interface and sociolinguistic contexts of semantic change.