Honorifics

In this paper I show that honorific pronominal paradigms vary in their patterning and that this variation, much as with lexical honorific registers, reflects whether honorific pronouns in these systems enact speaker's deference towards discourse Addressee or towards discourse Referent. Although the majority of attested cases of a so-called 'T/V-alternation' index the relationship between Speaker and Referent, there is a small, but robust set of cases where this distinction indexes the relationship between Speaker and Addressee. The paper offers arguments in support of, diagnostic methods for determining, and divergent diachronic pathways motivating, these different honorific alignments of pronominal paradigms.

The Kazak honorific system has been described to consist of a number of second person forms and terms of address. In addition to these core honorific expressions, however, my recent study of spoken Kazak in the Chinese Altai reveals that there are many other politeness features-both linguistic and non-linguistic-that constitute a loosely integrated honorific register system. They include grammatical distinctions (e.g., singular/plural, past/perfect, confirmative/non-confirmative), lexical distinctions (e.g., Chinese titles/Kazak kin terms), prosody (e.g., loud/quiet, fast/slow), as well as non-linguistic features (e.g., smoking/ non-smoking, male facial hair grown/removed, serving of black tea/milk tea). This paper describes these "non-core" expressions and the semiotic processes in which they, together with the core expressions, form a dichotomous system of contrast between plain and honorific registers.

This paper explores the social stratification of Maldivian society, with particular focus on its history and traces of earlier alleged caste systems and slavery as well as their impact on Maldivian society, and the implications this fact had for their social structure. I will argue that some anthropologically remarkable traces of earlier social stratification, such as slavery and the caste system, can still be found on the islands. The same holds true for the social structure of the island Minicoy, part of the Sultanate Maldives until the beginning of the 16th century, which now belongs to India. I will demonstrate that while the middle castes have largely disappeared, the upper level of the caste hierarchy (which has survived in the local elite), the lower castes and certain groups of former slaves have been much more resistant to social developments and structural changes in the society.

A maioria dos manuais de língua galega passam na ponta dos pés ao se referir às formas de tratamento. Limitam-se a assinalar a diferença entre tu/ti por um lado e vostê por outro. As referências a outras formas ainda vivas, embora moribundas no idioma, são muito escassas. Por isso, neste artigo ana-lisamos todas essas formas (vós de cortesia, ele/a, o tio/a tia) e mediante um sistema de etiquetagem comparamos as suas caraterísticas, principalmente a dêixis do tratamento. Aliás, tentamos estabelecer qual a sua origem e o seu desenvolvimento, também do ponto de vista estrutural, visando estabelecer um quadro completo de quais as formas de cortesia em galego.

In this paper, we observe the hitherto unnoticed phenomenon we dub dual suppletion in Japanese, where the same verbal root ‘su' (do) can supplete for potential as ‘deki' (do.POT) and honorific as ‘nasar' (do.HON) such that, when simultaneously conditioned by those two syntactic contexts, one suppletive form must be selected over the other. Importantly, dual suppletion is not only typologically unique but also theoretically significant in that competition between multiple suppletive forms cannot be resolved by the Subset Principle (Halle, 1997) nor explained by the notion of paradigms (Stump, 2001). Here, following Choi and Harley (2018) on dual suppletion in Korean, we propose a syntactic explanation for dual suppletion in the framework of Distributed Morphology and discuss empirical consequences of the proposed explanation.

This paper explores the social stratification of Maldivian society, with particular focus on its history and traces of earlier alleged caste systems and slavery as well as their impact on Maldivian society, and the implications this fact had for their social structure. I will argue that some anthropologically remarkable traces of earlier social stratification, such as slavery and the caste system, can still be found on the islands. The same holds true for the social structure of the island Minicoy, part of the Sultanate Maldives until the beginning of the 16th century, which now belongs to India. I will demonstrate that while the middle castes have largely disappeared, the upper level of the caste hierarchy (which has survived in the local elite), the lower castes and certain groups of former slaves have been much more resistant to social developments and structural changes in the society.

Brown and Levinson's theory of politeness (1978, 1987) is a detailed and large scale work that endeavors to explain and predict polite language behavior in all languages and cultures. It is therefore a theory with great importance not only for pragmatics, but also for ...

This chapter tracks the dissolution of a group of close, male friends or siaw1 to explore the “problem of peers” (Sidnell and Shohet 2013:623) in otherwise hierarchical Laos. My argument draws a parallel between how siaw1 relations are imagined and enacted, and ideologies surrounding the ‘bare’ pronominal forms these men use to refer to one another and themselves. Borrowing from a classic anthropology of ‘loose structures,’ I show that both ideas about siaw1 relations and the bare pronouns siaw1 employ, involve a mixture of aggression and solidarity. Siaw1 alternately represent and enact their friendships as perduring, stable, and sturdy social knots, bound ‘to the death,’ and as delicate ties that might unexpectedly fray or snap. These ambivalent forces contradict one another, but they also work together to prove the resilience of friendships. The same analysis illuminates the pragmatics of the bare first and second person pronouns ‘kuu3’ and ‘mùng2.’ Many have described these (and similarly ‘low’ pronouns cross-linguistically) as having two separate expressive forces––one intimate, the other aggressive. But in siaw1 friendships, kuu3 and mùng2 serve to entangle intimacy with masculine aggression, such that ‘aggression’ is not distinct from ‘solidarity’ but, rather, a means for expressing it.

Korean has a very developed honorifics system which requires speakers to make choice among appropriate hearer honorifics, referent honorifics and forms of address while speaking according to the various components of the sentence such as age and position of the listener or the subject of the sentence. Misuse of this mechanism may threaten interpersonal relations and cause serious problems in the society. Turkish learners have challenges while speaking Korean due to this complicated system which goes beyond being only a linguistic structure but an important social factor determining and balancing interpersonal relations. As it is almost impossible to speak suitable with this specific feature of Korean language without knowing grammatical and lexical forms of this complex system it is essential that learners are equipped with these forms along with the sociolinguistic background of Korean language in the teaching process.
This study aims to find out if the Turkish learners of Korean are aware of this trait of Korean and to what extent they can adopt right strategies regarding the system of honorifics in Korean. To test this, 2nd, 3rd and 4th grade students at the Department of Korean Language and Literature at Ankara University will be asked to answer an e-mail discourse completion test designed by J. Kim (2009) containing three different situations sent to [+age], [=age], and [−age] people respectively. Responses to the questionnaire will be analyzed based on the classification of Korean honorifics made by Brown 2008 composing of three dimensions: hearer honorifics, referent honorifics, and forms of address. Through this experiment it is aimed to determine whether Turkish learners can put honorifics into practice and what kind of mistakes they make in three different situations in which they send imaginary e-mails to the person who is older or younger than them or to a friend who is of the same age. Additionally, some suggestions will be made for teaching honorifics to Turkish learners of Korean in connection with the replies to the discourse completion tests used in this study. Also I will discuss how to include socio-linguistic features especially honorifics in teaching process of Korean as a foreign language in Turkey where showing deference to the listener or to the subject of the sentence is manipulated very differently.

A koreai és japán nyelv rendelkezik ún. beszédszintekkel, melyeket az állítmány
végződésének megválasztásával lehet kifejezni; ezek nem befolyásolják annak
jelentését, viszont pragmatikai tartalmakat közvetítenek. Ez azt is jelenti, hogy
ugyanazon állítás többféle végződéssel is szerepelhet, jelentése ugyanaz marad,
a beszédszint megválasztása a beszélő és a hallgató társadalmi rangjától függ.
A leíró nyelvtanok csak a szociopragmatikai információ közvetítését tulajdonítják
a beszédszinteknek. Szinte teljesen figyelmen kívül hagyják azt a tényt,
hogy a beszélők valójában váltogatva használják azokat. A brown–levinsoni
(1987) udvariasságelmélet viszont nem tud mit kezdeni a váltakozó használattal;
– világos tehát, hogy ez a keret önmagában nem elégséges.
Az utóbbi évtized szociolingvisztikai megfigyeléseire támaszkodva olyan keretet
javaslok, mely az udvariasságelmélet mellett egyéb extralingvisztikai természetű
tartalmak közvetítésével magyarázatot adhat a beszédszintekre és azok váltakozó
használatára. A beszédszinthasználat alább bemutatott sokrétűsége arra
enged következtetni, hogy ez a használat valójában nem más, mint a kérdéses
pragmatikai tartalmak kontextusfüggő, metaforikus használata. Elemzésemhez
a Josef Stern által kidolgozott metaforikus karakter fogalmát hívom segítségül.