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The speaker-addressee relation at the syntax-semantics interface
- Language
- Linguistic Society of America
- Volume 95, Number 1, March 2019
- pp. 1-36
- 10.1353/lan.2019.0008
- Article
- Additional Information
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Abstract:
Languages have several grammatical means of expressing the relation between speaker and addressee, including speech-style particles, politeness pronouns, allocutive marking, and honorifics. Despite the similarity in the meaning they convey, these politeness markers fall into two distributional classes: some (‘content-oriented markers of politeness’) can occur in complement clauses, while others (‘utterance-oriented markers of politeness’) are restricted to matrix contexts. Focusing on speech-style markers in Korean and second-person pronouns in Romance languages (especially Italian), we develop a dynamic pragmatics model of the distinct kind of meaning that they encode and provide an analysis that accounts for their distributional differences.