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As gender-indexed terms which are characteristic of interactions in the military, those simple address forms can be regarded as the definitive nexus of language, gender, and the military. Given that the terms are used upward, from subordinate to superior, I base a portion of my analysis on work with politeness and honorifics. In addition, I review literature regarding gender-indexed terms. Based upon the literature on gender indexing, I would have expected to find indications that “ma’am” as an address form carried less respect or power than “sir” as an address form.
Since my review of the literature revealed that there is very little work regarding the use of “ma’am” and “sir,” the findings in chapter 3 contribute a baseline analysis of the environments in which “ma’am” and “sir” occur in military usage. I found relatively consistent usage, except for a seeming disparity in civilians’ use of “ma’am” and “sir” to military members, and a difference in the use of sentence-final “sir” and “ma’am” as a tag to a question. My numbers imply that civilians were more likely to use “sir” with male military superiors than they were likely to use “ma’am” with female military superiors. Though these data do not show this conclusively, they suggest that this could be the case—a case which calls for more research into this question. My numbers also seem to show that male superiors were more likely to be asked questions which were phrased as questions, contained rising intonation, and were tagged with the address form “sir.” Asking questions can easily be regarded as a form of deference to superiors in that the decision-making power lies with the superior. Metaphorically, this is an act of putting the ball in his court and not hers, as it were. These findings suggest that civilians construct the male as the model military officer by proffering more “sirs” to him, and military members construct the male military superior as deserving of greater deference through use of questions tagged with the respectful “sir.”
Like honorifics, narratives, too, were a frequent occurrence. As I first listened to the recordings I collected, I became interested in the role of conversational narratives in the institutional environment, largely because some of them were quite colorful and entertaining. It quickly became apparent that narratives were a regular occurrence in the participants’ duty days. My review of research revealed that the role of narrative in the workday is an area of relatively recent interest in sociolinguistics.