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Politeness Distinctions in Pronouns

by Johannes Helmbrecht http://wals.info/feature/45

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 12:00 pm by wals and is filed under Nominal Categories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “Politeness Distinctions in Pronouns”

  1. Kosta, Peter Says:
    August 20th, 2008 at 1:16 pm

    You treat Polish as a language with a binary politeness distinctions of the common European type (German DU – SIE). Why not implement that (1)
    in Polish the honorific forms are not expressed by a personal pronouns but periphrastically by a nominal category PAN (literally Mr./Sg.), PANI (litteraly Mrs./Sg.) and PANOWIE (P. only men) or PANIE (Pl. only women) and PANSTWO (men and women)?

  2. Martin Haspelmath Says:
    September 4th, 2008 at 1:44 pm

    In this WALS feature, the question is only whether a language has a politeness distinction and if so, how many different levels. The type of honorific expression is not considered here. This would be an interesting topic for another feature, of course, but it should be kept in mind that the “noun” status of pan/pani etc. is problematic. They behave as nouns inflectionally and obviously derive from nouns diachronically, but syntactically they seem to behave much more like pronouns (i.e. not unlike German Sie, French vous, etc.).

  3. Peter Kosta Says:
    September 5th, 2008 at 7:14 pm

    Dear Martin,

    thank you very much for your comments and yes: this is true: The Noun Phrases PAN, PANI… are of nominal origin but behave now in certain contexts like pronouns (just like German Sie – du or
    French Vous – tu, toi. BUT: if you take certain titles like Pane profesorze “Mr. Professor” in Vocative vs. …. jak Pan profesor mysli in Nominative Sg. “how Professor (honorific)
    thinks”) — things become syntactically tricky and more complex: I can refer you to an article and a
    book by £aziñski, Marek (2006), “O panach i paniach. Polskie rzeczowniki tytularne i ich asymetria rodzajowo-p³ciowa”, Warszawa. Wydawnictwo naukowe PWN. There you will find that the problem is not as easy as it seems to be…

    I shall be glad if I may contribute to the dictionary.

    Best wishes,
    Peter

  4. Celso Alvarez-Cáccamo Says:
    January 20th, 2009 at 3:08 am

    I have a similar observation as Peter Kosta’s regarding the treatment of pronouns versus noun phrases in politeness in Portuguese. If the type of politeness (not necessarily “honorific”) expression “is not considered here”, then European Portuguese should have the Multiple Politeness Distinctions value: “Tu / Você / O senhor, A senhora”. The usage of “O senhor / A senhora” is more extended than anecdotal (as it may be in Spanish) — it is systematic for the features of -solidarity, +power (indicating that the speaker is in a subordinate position). In Galizan Portuguese the system is binary (T / V, where both T and V have variants), with occasional use of “O senhor”. On its part, in Brazilian Portuguese the distinction is indeed binary: “Você / O senhor” (Azevedo, Milton M. 1981. Sobre o emprego de você no português brasileiro atual. Hispania, vol. 64, n. 2, pp. 273-278). Also, the deictic-avoidance strategy is common.

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