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theses

ETD doctoral

Natural language uses first and second person pronouns to refer to the speaker and addressee. This dissertation takes as its starting point the view that speaker and addressee are also implicated in sentences that do not have such pronouns (Speas and Tenny 2003). It investigates two linguistic phenomena: honorification and indexical shift, and the interactions between them, and shows that these discourse participants have an important role to play. The investigation is based on Magahi, an Eastern Indo-Aryan language spoken mainly in the state of Bihar (India), where these phenomena manifest themselves in ways not previously attested in the literature. The phenomena are analyzed based on the native speaker judgements of the author along with judgements of one more native speaker, and sometimes with others as the occasion has presented itself.

Magahi shows a rich honorification system (the encoding of “social status” in grammar) along several interrelated dimensions. Not only 2nd person pronouns but 3rd person pronouns also morphologically mark the honorificity of the referent with respect to the speaker. Agreement morphology also tracks honorification in the form of subject agreement and a special type of allocutive/addressee agreement. Addressee agreement in Magahi is unique in that it is found in all kinds of finite embedded clauses, showing evidence against the standard claim that addressee agreement is a root clause phenomenon (Miyagawa 2012, 2017 and others). I take every finite clause to syntactically represent the speaker (SP) and the addressee (ADD), as co-ordinates of FinP (cf. Bhadra 2017), in addition, I argue that all DPs have a semantic honorificity feature (e.g., iHON), which has a relational semantics (cf. Portner et al. 2019), where one of its arguments is the DP it attaches to. The second argument is a variable bound by the closest SP coordinate found in FinP. Thus, each DP expresses its social status relative to the speaker, independently of other DPs in the clause. This differs from accounts such as Portner et al. (2019), where honorification is fixed once and for all at the level of the clause. Subject agreement/honorification is a result of T agreeing with the subject and Addressee agreement/honorification is a result of Fin agreeing with the ADD coordinate. The relatively complex patterns of honorification in nominal and verbal domains are explained within this system under a unified account.

The other phenomenon investigated is Indexical Shift. First and second person pronouns in Magahi can optionally shift under an attitude verb to refer to the higher subject and object. What is interesting about Magahi is the interaction of indexical shift with honorific marking on other elements such as 2nd person pronouns, 3rd person pronouns and addressee agreement. They also shift when there is indexical shift. There are other complex interactions between the two that are covered. A key distinction that plays a role in the explanation is between binding of person pronouns via SP and ADD co-ordinates of Fin (cf., Baker 2008) by the arguments of the immediately higher predicate, mediated by the attitude verb (von Stechow 2003), vs binding by matrix SP and ADD co-ordinates. Because indexicality and honorification are both sensitive to binding, complex interactions between them are predicted. The domain of investigation includes declarative clauses as well as interrogatives and imperatives.

Honorificity and indexical shift have been studied in a large number of languages at this point and there is a sizable literature on their syntactic and semantic properties. This dissertation, in addition to accounting for honorificity and indexicality in a previously unstudied language, highlights the advantages of studying these two phenomena together. It thus argues for a more intrinsic connection between honorificity and indexicality in the grammar of natural language.

ETD_11250

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

doi:10.7282/t3-am2x-5p94

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