Animal names used in addressing people in Serbian § Sabina Halupka-Resˇetar*, BiljanaRadic´ Faculty of Philosophy, Department of English Language and Literature, Stevana Music ´a 24, 21000 Novi Sad, Yugoslavia Received 28 February 2002; received in revised form 28 February 2003; accepted 3 March 2003 Abstract The paper deals with combined metaphorical/vocative uses of animal names in Serbian in addressing people, both abusively and affectionately, thereby expressing the speakers’ attitude towards their addressee. The discussion is based on the results obtained in a survey conducted with some 100 university students of linguistics. The survey was organized in the following way: the students were given a questionnaire containing 40 animal names and were asked (a) to decide if they would use a given animal name to address a male or a female person, or both, (b) to determine if they would use the name abusively or affectionately, (c) to say how frequently they would use the name, (d) to give the morphosyntactic structure in which they would use the name, and (e) to describe a concrete situation in which they would use the name. The research shows that animal vocatives are usually used as human invectives, although a certain number of vocatives (mostly diminutives) are used to express affection. The results are further analyzed with respect to: (a) the typical morphosyntactic structures in which the animal names occur, (b) the typical situations that provoke such uses, and (c) semantico-pragmatic motivations for the choice of particular names. # 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Animal names; Addressing; Endearment; Abuse; Metaphor; Serbian Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 1891–1902 www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma 0378-2166/03/$ - see front matter # 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/S0378-2166(03)00052-3 § The present paper is an expanded version of the poster presented at the 7th International Pragmatics Conference in Budapest, 9–14 July 2000. The authors would like to thank Professor Tvrtko Prc´ic´ for his many insightful comments, as well as two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and sugges- tions on an earlier draft of this article. * Corresponding author. E-mail address: sabinah@eunet.yu (S. Halupka-Resˇetar).