Honorifics without [hon]

Abstract

AbstractHonorifics are grammaticalized reflexes of politeness, often recruiting existing featural values (e.g. French recruits pluralvousfor polite address, and German, third person pluralSie). This paper aims to derive their cross-linguistic distribution and interpretation without [hon], an analytical feature present since Corbett (2000). The striking generalization that emerges from a cross-linguistic survey of 120 languages is that only certain featural values are ever recruited for honorification: plural, third person, and indefinite. I show that these values are precisely those which are semantically unmarked, or presuppositionless, allowing the speaker to consider an interlocutor’snegative face(Brown and Levinson 1978). I propose an alternative analysis based on the interaction between semantic markedness, an avoidance-based pragmatic maxim called the Taboo of Directness, andMaximize Presupposition!(Heim 1991) to derive honorific meaning.