A Semantics for Honorifics with Reference to Thai

PACLIC 28 !503 A Semantics for Honorifics with Reference to Thai Eric McCready Aoyama Gakuin University Department of English and American Literature 4-4-25 Shibuya, Shibuya-ku Tokyo 150-8366 JAPAN mccready@cl.aoyama.ac.jp Abstract This paper proposes a general framework for the semantics of honorific expressions, includ- ing honorific pronouns, morphology, and dis- course particles. Such expressions are claimed to indicate a level of politeness which must be compatible with a level of formality fixed by the discourse context together with sociolin- guistic factors, and, with their use, to change the range of formality the context specifies. Specific honorifics are taken to introduce ex- pressive content of a kind modeled by real- numbered intervals. This general picture is ex- emplified with the honorific system of Thai. 1 Introduction The phenomena of honorification and politeness reg- ister have received extensive attention in linguistics, both from formal and informal perspectives. Most of this work has focused on three general topics. First, from a formal perspective, researchers have been concerned with the way in which semantic composition with honorific expressions takes place, and with the kinds of denotations which they have; some main results of these investigations will be summarized later in this paper.1 A second line of research is found within the sociolinguistic tradition (and also within discourse analysis), and looks at ways in which speakers use politeness expressions 1Work on syntactic aspects of honorification is closely re- lated (Niinuma, 2003), but since morphological affixes with honorific meanings will not be my focus here, I will not con- sider this aspect of honorification further in the present paper. to indicate aspects of their social identities and fur- ther their general societal goals (Brown and Levin- son, 1987; Watts, 2003). Finally, there is a tra- dition which attempts to situate the use of polite- ness, including honorifics, within a general theory of rational linguistic behavior; this work begins with Brown and Levinson (1987) and continues to game- theoretic accounts like that of van Rooy (2003). Given the amount of research done in this area, it is no surprise that significant results have been ob- tained. However, a problematic feature of the litera- ture is that the three strands of research mentioned above do not engage extensively with each other. Research on honorific meanings tends not to con- sider observations made within discourse analysis; game-theoretic accounts try to predict rational hon- orific use without a serious semantics for honorific content. A theory which can bring the various as- pects of politeness together seems necessary, espe- cially given the current interest in honorification in formal circles, and further is essential for the auto- matic generation of appropriate speech in computa- tional pragmatics. The aim of the present paper is to propose a theory of the requisite sort. That said, space limitations preclude doing more than laying the formal groundwork needed; modeling substan- tial sociolinguistic observations and tying the result to game-theoretic calculation is left for future work. The paper is structured as follows. I will take the system of …

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