The Speaker-Addressee Relation at the Syntax-Semantics Interface

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.