Allocutivity and the Syntax of Honorifics

Allocutive markers (AMs) (i.e., markers that encode addressee features in syntax) and honorifics (which encode the social relation in syntax) raise questions about the interface between morphosyntax and discourse. On the AM side, the founding literature suggests that AMs are unembeddable. However, recent studies reveal that AMs are freely available in embedded contexts in some languages. This raises questions about where exactly discourse participants are represented in syntactic structures. On the honorific side, unlike traditional phi-features (number, person, gender), honorific features are relational and dynamic and encode the social relations between the speaker, the addressee, and potentially third persons as well. This raises the question of how a discourse-sensitive, relational feature can be formally encoded. Further issues include the morphosyntactic nature of AMs—the honorifics’ interaction within the verbal and nominal domains. We present theoretical and crosslinguistic advances that have been made on these issues as well as suggestions concerning where future research in this area could go.