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11.5: Other ways of marking politeness

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    138684
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    Honorific markers and speech style markers like those discussed in the previous two sections have no descriptive content, but only a use-conditional, utterance modifying function. However, there are words in many languages which express both normal descriptive content plus a use-conditional function as a marker of politeness.

    One of the most common ways across languages of showing respect or politeness to the addressee is by distinguishing polite vs. familiar forms of the second person pronoun, e.g. vous vs. tu in French, Sie vs. du in German, etc. Malay has a very complex system of first and second person pronouns. The neutral first person singular form is saya; aku is considered more intimate, for use with friends and family members. Beta is the first person singular form used by royalty, and patik is the first person singular form used by commoners when addressing royalty. There is no native Malay second person singular pronoun which is truly neutral; kamu, awak, and engkau are all felt to be informal or intimate to varying degrees. The term anda was invented as part of the standardization of Malaysian as a national language to fill this gap, but is rarely used in conversational speech. Second person pronouns tend to be avoided when addressing royalty or other highly respected people, by using titles, kin terms, etc. instead.

    Lexical substitution as a means of honorification is not limited to pronouns. Balinese and Javanese are famous for their speech levels, or registers. In these languages, two or more forms are available for thousands of lexical items, e.g. Balinese makita (high) vs. edot (low) ‘want’; sanganan (high) vs. jaja (low) ‘cake’.19 The choice of which form to use is determined by the relative social status, caste, etc. of the speaker and addressee. Korean and Japanese also have suppletive forms for some words, e.g. Korean pap (plain) vs. cinci (polite) ‘cooked rice, meal’. The primary meaning contributed by words of this sort is to the truthconditional content of the sentence; their use-conditional politeness function is in a sense secondary.


    19 Arka (2005)


    This page titled 11.5: Other ways of marking politeness is shared under a CC BY 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Paul Kroeger (Language Library Press) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.