Fiske and his coauthors (1991, Haslam and Fiske 1998) argue that there are four fundamental relational models according to which people organize social interactions: Authority Ranking, Communal Sharing, Equality Matching, and Market Pricing. Recent research has isolated certain lexical categories as both cross-culturally universal and sociolinguistically significant, e.g., slang, swearwords, honorifics, nicknames, pet names and terms of endearment. These apparently universal linguistic categories, when coordinated with the relational models, suggest a reinterpretation of Fiske’s categories into three, rather than four types. Evidence on the usage of these lexical types collected from speakers of American English and of Mandarin Chinese support this reinterpretation of Fiske’s relational models taxonomy. The new paradigm references informality, intimacy, deference and respect as the key distinctive features describing both the relational models and their corresponding linguistic forms in English and Chinese.

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