Abstract
This paper discusses the notion of grounds using honorifics as a main example case. Grounds are ‘global’ assumptions that are essential for the use of particular linguistic items or constructions. They differ from other meaning categories in various ways, for example differing from presupposition in that they are sufficiently large, complex, and even ineffable as to be essentially unaccommodatable. Certain grounds of honorifics are presented together with several other examples and some implications of the analysis discussed.
Thanks to the audience of LENLS 2022 for interesting and helpful discussion, and to audiences at the 2022 Deutschen Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft and the 22nd Szklarska Poreba Workshop on the Roots of Pragmasemantics.
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Notes
- 1.
The last principle, (D), seems extendable to a converse position, ie. that one need not exhibit any kind of politeness behavior to perceived social inferiors, but this is a kind of behavior idiosyncratic to badly behaved individuals and probably doesn’t ground the actual use of honorifics.
- 2.
Here ‘Mx’ indicates an ungendered honorific suffix.
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McCready, E. (2023). Honorifics, Grounds and Ideologies. In: Yada, K., Takama, Y., Mineshima, K., Satoh, K. (eds) New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. JSAI-isAI 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13856. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36190-6_13
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