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The Speaker-Addressee Relation at the Syntax-Semantics Interface

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

Paul Portner ,
Miok Pak  and
Raffaella Zanuttini
Paul Portner*
Affiliation:
Georgetown University
Miok Pak*
Affiliation:
George Washington University
Raffaella Zanuttini*
Affiliation:
Yale University
*
[portnerp@georgetown.edu]
[pakm@gwu.edu]
[raffaella.zanuttini@yale.edu]
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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.

Keywords

addresseepolitenessembeddingspeech stylepronounsindexicalshonorifics

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Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 95 , Issue 1 , March 2019 , pp. 1 - 36
Copyright
Copyright © 2019 Linguistic Society of America

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