[Lingtyp] Name this category

Wed Jan 22 09:55:17 UTC 2020

It's nice to hear about these various gender-related markers, but Scott actually asked about a name for a "friendliness/informality" marker. Recall that the two markers in Bodo are dependent on speaker gender, not on addressee gender.

It seems that languages often encode the type of social setting not only in the lexicon (e.g. choice of formal vs. informal words such as "kids/children"), but also in various grammatical markers, e.g. informal attention particles (e.g. "hey!"), honorific markers on verbs, polite pronouns, diminutives expreasing "endearment". I'm not sure if there is an overarching term for this heterogeneous range of phenomena. (When such markers look like parts of words, they have been treated under "morphopragmatics".)

It seems that particles that ONLY signal the type of social setting (rather than some other meaning in addition to the social setting) have not often been reported.

But maybe the Bodo particles can also be taken as signaling the gender of the speaker, as a mirror image of Siva Kalyan's Telugu and Tamil examples, which signal the gender of the addressee, in addition to social setting (informal/intimate/respectful). They could then be called "locutive-politeness" particles, while the Dravidian particles would be "allocutive-politeness" particles. (Taking "politeness" as a shorthand for social setting distinctions such as informal/friendly/intimate/respectful.)

Martin

On 22.01.20 09:03, Gilles Authier wrote:

In Tindi (East Caucasian),
1) (elevationally marked) demonstratives (or presentatives) index the gender of the addressee ;
2) imperative verb forms can index it, conveying politeness.

ssajħata agja-ra-j zinada r-oo ihwa-qoo.
S.(f) here.lower-npl-f cow.pl.nom npl-come.perf shepherd-post.el
« Saihat, here are the cows coming from the pasture. »

q'aj b-aχ-a-j!
furniture(n) n-take-imper-f
"You(f) buy furniture!"

Gilles Authier

On Wed, Jan 22, 2020 at 8:15 AM Michael Daniel <misha.daniel at gmail.com<mailto:misha.daniel at gmail.com>> wrote:
Hi.

In Bagvalal, East Caucasian, some particles are indexical of the gender of the addressee. These particles apparently revolve on interactional categories involving the addressee (interrogation, shared knowledge, imperative) but are not (necessarily) referential in the sense indicated by Francoise. As the Basque allocutive, they are on the addressee's side, and not on the speaker's side as in Scott's examples, As far as I understand, this also happens in other East Caucasian languages languages of the Andic branch. See (Kibrik 2001: 174 - Bagvalinskij jazyk: grammatika, teksty, slovari) - a very short but very informative one-page discussion.

Michael Daniel

ср, 22 янв. 2020 г. в 03:30, Siva Kalyan <sivakalyan.princeton at gmail.com<mailto:sivakalyan.princeton at gmail.com>>:
I would add that allocutive particles in Dravidian languages could be seen as a somewhat open class, which periodically absorbs nouns: e.g. Telugu -ayyā < ayya 'lord', and Tamil =sār < English "sir".

Siva

On 22 Jan 2020, at 11:23 am, Siva Kalyan <sivakalyan.princeton at gmail.com<mailto:sivakalyan.princeton at gmail.com>> wrote:

Some Dravidian languages also have allocutive markers (though I've never seen them described as such). Telugu has at least =rā (informal) and -aṇḍi (respectful); Tamil has at least the following:

  *   =ḍā (informal masculine)
  *   =ḍī (informal feminine)
  *   =pā (intimate masculine)
  *   =mā (intimate feminine)
  *   =kā (intimate elder sister)
  *   -ṅga(ḷ) (respectful)

The "intimate" allocutive particles (my terminology) are historically contractions of kin terms (appā 'father', ammā 'mother', akkā 'elder sister'—other kin terms may also contract in this way, but I've only ever heard it with these three, the last one very rarely). Also, =mā and =pā don't exactly line up with female and male addressee, as =mā can also be used by a female speaker to a male addressee; also, =ḍā can be used when speaking to a child regardless of gender.

Siva

On 22 Jan 2020, at 8:35 am, Vladimir Panov <panovmeister at gmail.com<mailto:panovmeister at gmail.com>> wrote:

Dear Scott,

Françoise is right about the allocutive. There is a paper by Anton Antonov i which this category is treated typologically:

Antonov, Anton. 2015. Verbal allocutivity in a crosslinguistic perspective. Linguistic Typology 19(1). 55–85.

Best,
Vladimir

вт, 21 янв. 2020 г. в 12:18, Scott Delancey <delancey at uoregon.edu<mailto:delancey at uoregon.edu>>:
Bodo (Tibeto-Burman, NE India) has a set of particles, two used by men and two by women, which indicate that the conversation is friendly and informal. Reminiscent of Thai krap and khaa, but with the opposite sense. Does anyone know if anyone has encountered such a category and given it a label? I need to decide what to call these, and would just as soon not make up a term if someone has already done it.

Scott DeLancey
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Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at shh.mpg.de<mailto:haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>)
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