Honorification as social meaning

This chapter concludes the book and discusses some outstanding issues, including the import of the discussion and analysis of the book for the theory of expressive content and for the place of honorifics in the theory of social meaning.

Pronouns and honorification

This chapter discusses honorific pronouns in Thai and Japanese. It is argued that Thai honorific first and second person pronouns directly refer to discourse registers, which has empoirical implications for their distribution; Japanese pronouns, conversely, are argued to introduce speaker commitments of a particular kind which have implications for register but don't reference It directly, resulting in a different distribution o fpronouns from Thai. Gender specifications on Japanese fjirst-person pronouns are claimed to result from expressive predications of properties related to gender stereotypes rather than direct predication of gender.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the concept of honorifics and provides examples of different honorific types from several languages. It then proceeds to outline the remainder of the book and it structure. Finally, it discusses the relation between honorification and politeness, suggesting that the two can be cleanly separated.

Utterance honorifics

This chapter uses the toolkit provided in chapter 3 to analyse utterance honorifics, honorific forms which seem to act at the utterance level, giving an honorific character to the entire speech act that the sentence is used to perform. Utterance honorifics in Japanese, namely certain copular forms, and Thai, namely so-called politeness particles, are analyzed, along with register-distinguished terms in each language (in addition to Javanese).

Honorification as expressive

One obvious initial question that has to be addressed for any theory of honorification is the type of meaning that honorifics introduce. Examining the options makes it clear that honorification is best viewed as expressive. This chapter will summarize some existing discussion of both expressives and honorifics, and provide additional data showing that honorifics show the properties of expressive content. The chapter also compares other possibilities for honorific meanings and critically discusses diagnostics for expressivity.

Role honorifics

This chapter considers a kind of honorific which doesn't directly reference register: rather, it introduces a predication of a property which is relevant to social status or formality as a result of social facts and speaker knowledge of those facts. This chapter treats such honorification in terms of default reasoning about intention on the basis of social facts and speaker use of certain expressions.

Argument honorifics

This chapter discusses argument honorifics, forms which target a particular argument of the sentence for honorification. It is argued that, semantically, these forms can be analysed by allowing abstraction over registers. The problem of finding the proper argument to target during semantic composition is discussed and several options are explored.

A theory of register for honorification

This chapter provides a formal semantic framework for the analysis of honorifics which satisfies two key criteria. First, many languages have honorific forms which reference the current discourse context, specifically the relationshipswhich hold between the various contextual agents. This means that any semantics for honorifics must provide a model of a discourse context which makes available the requisite formality relationships and relativizes them to agents; further, given that honorific use can evolve over a discourse, it is necessary to make whatever contexts are introduced dynamic in a way that tracks patterns of honorific use. Provision must also be made for the introduction of expressive properties, which is done via the use of a type-theory based analysis of expressive content.