Meeting Description

Honorifics are grammaticalized forms that encode the social relation between the speaker and the addressee/a 3rd person. A well-known instance comes from honorific pronouns such as vous in French and te in Finnish. Honorifics were generally treated as a socio-pragmatic phenomenon, located outside narrow syntax. Consequently, earlier work on honorifics focuses either on their typology (Comrie 1975, 1976, Joseph 1987, Helmbrecht 2005, a.o), or their pragmatics/use (Lakoff 1973, Brown & Levinson 1978, Matsumoto 1988, Ide 1989 a.o.). Recently, however, proposals arguing for a syntactic treatment of honorifics have become available (e.g. Macaulay 2015, Ackema & Neeleman 2018, Portner, Pak & Zanuttini 2019, Ritter & Wiltschko 2019, Alok & Baker 2022, Ikawa 2022, Kaur & Yamada 2022, Kumari 2023). This shift, which (sometimes) capitalizes on a more general renewed interest in the syntacticization of discourse (in the sense of Speas & Tenny 2003), is motivated by novel data on honorifics, which shows that not all reflexes of honorificity are amenable to a purely pragmatic treatment. For instance, languages such as Hindi-Urdu, Punjabi and Marathi have honorific nouns, which display distinct morphosyntactic behaviour (concord, nominal inflection, agreement) as compared to regular nouns (Bhatt & Davis 2022, Kaur 2023, Sinha 2023). Similarly, in the verbal/clausal domain, various phenomena which underlie syntactic agreement relations also exhibit honorific distinctions. Take, for instance, imperatives in Dutch (Bennis 2006) and Korean (Zanuttini, Pak & Portner 2012), as well as allocutive agreement in Basque (Haddican 2018), Japanese (Miyagawa 2012, Yamada 2019) and Magahi (Alok 2021), among others.

Accompanying this shift, there has been some very important but (mostly) separate research on the meaning and morphology of honorifics. With respect to the former, there has been substantial recent research, all of which appears to take honorifics to introduce expressive meaning (Potts & Kawahara 2004, Kim & Sells 2007, McCready 2010, 2014). On the morphological front, the honorific (and humilific) verb forms in Japanese and Korean raise a range of issues relating to root suppletion, morphological contiguity/*ABA configurations, dissociated morpheme insertion, among others, which have been addressed in serious detail (e.g. Chung 2007, Thompson 2011, Choi & Harley 2019, Truong 2022). Additionally, morphological research has attempted principled grammatical accounts of both the emergence of honorific forms in pronominal paradigms as well as the (rarer instances of) loss of non-honorific forms (e.g. Simon 2003, Aalberse & Stoop 2015, Wang 2023).

Despite important progress, many fundamental issues relating to the grammar of honorifics, as listed below, remain open:

• Given varied honorific phenomena, what is the status of the honorific feature in grammar? To what extent is a unified account possible?

• What are the various diachronic paths to (dedicated/recycled) honorification across nominal and verbal domains? How do they inform the investigation of synchronic processes associated with honorifics?

• What is the extent to which standard criteria of expressivity apply across different types of honorifics? Relatedly, how does the claim that honorifics have expressive meaning reconcile with instances of syntactic honorific agreement (i.e., morphological but not semantic doubling)?

• What explains variation in the embeddability of clausal addressee-oriented honorifics (allocutive agreement, speech style particles etc.) across languages?

With a view to bring together researchers working on different aspects of honorificity, we invite contributions that discuss novel empirical facts (across modalities) on honorifics and/or explore theoretical approaches to honorifics. The aforementioned issues do not constitute an exhaustive list of potential topics.

Submission Guidelines:

• Each author may submit no more than one single-authored and one co-authored abstract.

•  Abstracts should fit two A4 pages, including examples and references.

•  Please use 1-inch margins on all sides, and a 12-point font.

•  Submission link: https://easyabs.linguistlist.org/conference/CHAMP2 

Important Dates:

Deadline for submission of abstracts: September 3, 2023 [CLOSED]

Notification of acceptance: October 11, 2023 [SENT]

Dates of the workshop: February 1-2, 2024