Expressivity and Honorifics

Abstract Social-deictic meaning conveyed by honorific expressions, or honorificity, is a particularly interesting type of expressive content in that it can be more tightly entangled with descriptive content than most other types of expressive content, such as those contributed by interjections like ouch and expletives like damn. Mainly drawing on observations from (standard) Japanese, a language recognized as having a highly rich inventory of honorifics, this chapter illustrates (i) how different types of honorifics in a given language may encode honorific meanings that contrast in their targets, strengths, and polarity, and (ii) how their usage may be constrained by some general discourse principles, including one akin to “Maximize Presupposition”. It is further discussed that the composition of honorific meaning cannot be successfully represented within a multidimensional approach à la Potts, leading to the so-called binding problem; a “pseudo-multidimensional” analysis will be presented as an alternative.