GURMEET KAUR

Honorifics are a linguistic encoding of social relations between the speaker and another individual (e.g. addressee, utterance referent, bystander etc.), which are often grammaticalised. While the meaning and usage of honorifics has received much attention, the morphological and syntactic aspects of honorificity remain under-researched. This project seeks to explore the morphosyntax of honorificity, with focus on the following questions:

• A most basic question for a morphosyntactic analysis of honorificity assignment remains controversial: how does honorificity obtain on a (pro)-nominal? In this paper with Akitaka Yamada, we argue that assignment of honorificity is not a uniform phenomenon across languages - while honorificity is lexically listed on pronouns in Japanese with no role for syntax, pronouns in Punjabi host an honorific projection which affects agreement transformations. This difference has important consequences for the availability of mismatching instances of honorificity between a 2P pronoun and the allocutive/addressee-agreement marker within the same clause.

• What is the nature of the honorific projection? In this WCCFL41 proceedings paper that investigates honorific nouns (with a singular reference) in Punjabi, I show that the honorific projection (HonP) in Punjabi hosts a masculine plural feature bundle, and occurs higher in the nominal structure than the Num(ber) head specified as singular and the n head specified as masculine/feminine based on the gender of the noun. 

`Charting Honorific and Addressee Morphosyntactic Processes' (CHAMP) is a venue for researchers to discuss theoretical and experimental approaches to honorifics and addressee-related phenomena in spoken and sign languages. 

CHAMP originated from a joint project between IIT Delhi and UCL - The Grammar of Honorifics: Dialectal Micro-comparison among Eastern Indo-Aryan Languages, and was first held in January 2023 at University College London. The 2nd edition of the workshop (CHAMP 2) will be hosted by the University of Göttingen on February 1-2, 2024. It will be funded by the DFG project Addressee in Syntax.

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Many Indo-Aryan languages including Hindi-Urdu, Punjabi and Bangla make a morphological distinction between imperatives that require the addressee to act immediately after the imperative is issued (immediate imperatives/IMM) and imperatives that require the addressee to act later (deferred imperatives/DFR).  Bangla shows a difference in negatability between immediate and deferred imperatives , unattested in Hindi-Urdu or Punjabi. This latter set of languages, however, show a difference in the occurrence of polarity items (completive compound verbs/CCVs) under negation across immediate and deferred imperatives. In view of this rich empirical landscape, this project is the first formal investigation into the grammar of IMM-DFR imperatives in Indo-Aryan languages. 

• For evidence that both IMM and DFR forms are syntactically and semantically true imperatives despite their morphology, see these FASAL proceedings (with Neil Banerjee).

• In this unpublished squib with Neil, it is argued that most existing approaches to banning negative imperatives do not succeed for Bangla, which, despite a unique marker of negation, can only allow DFR but not IMM imperatives to be negated. 

• See these CLS proceedings with Julie Goncharov, where we provide an account for the differential ban on negated CCVs across immediate and deferred imperatives in Hindi-Urdu.