A whole cloud of history, culture and society and a drop of semantics: A reversible binomial as a form of address in Georgian

Abstract

The paper is an attempt to reflect on various aspects of a reversible binomial form of address, a
Georgian equivalent of the English formula for addressing an audience Ladies and Gentlemen.
The discussions of its constituent terms within the system of Georgian forms of address, of their
etymology and semantic development, of some aspects related to its combinability with other
terms lay a foundation for establishing explications of both its individual constituent terms and
the reversible binomial form of address (including its both feminine-first and masculine-first
variants, the ordering principles of which hardly pertaining to a speaker’s gender preferences)
based on the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach. All of these aspects of the investigation
facilitate identification of various, normally both language- and culture-specific peculiarities of
the form and terms in point.