Chapter 12. Formality by distance in Spanish and Catalan
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Gavin Bembridge
Abstract
Unlike the pragmatic literature, a pronoun’s ability to distinguish levels of formality has received relatively little dedicated attention in the syntactic literature. One definition of formality from the politeness literature defines it as social distance (Brown & Levinson 1987). We take the idea that formality can be viewed as distance literally and argue that second-person pronouns can incorporate Harbour’s (2016) projection, χ, that encodes spatial semantics. Variation in second-person pronouns results from differences in each language’s specific pronominal resources and the social meanings they are assigned.
Abstract
Unlike the pragmatic literature, a pronoun’s ability to distinguish levels of formality has received relatively little dedicated attention in the syntactic literature. One definition of formality from the politeness literature defines it as social distance (Brown & Levinson 1987). We take the idea that formality can be viewed as distance literally and argue that second-person pronouns can incorporate Harbour’s (2016) projection, χ, that encodes spatial semantics. Variation in second-person pronouns results from differences in each language’s specific pronominal resources and the social meanings they are assigned.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Acknowledgements vii
- Introduction 1
-
A. Interfaces
- Chapter 1. Picard subject clitics 11
- Chapter 2. A child’s view of Romance modification 35
- Chapter 3. Definite determiners in Romance 57
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B. Bridging issues at the CP-TP-vP levels
- Chapter 4. Differential object marking, oblique morphology, and enriched case hierarchies 81
- Chapter 5. A deletion account of referential null objects in Basque Spanish 97
- Chapter 6. Same EPP, different null subject type 111
- Chapter 7. On (un)grammatical sequences of se s in Spanish 127
- Chapter 8. On the interpretation of the Spanish 1st person plural pronoun 143
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C. Bridging issues at the PP-DP levels
- Chapter 9. French ne … que exceptives in prepositional contexts 163
- Chapter 10. Interpreting reduplicated numerals in Old Ibero-Romance 177
- Chapter 11. Value and cardinality in the evaluation of bare singulars in Brazilian Portuguese 193
- Chapter 12. Formality by distance in Spanish and Catalan 207
-
D. Bridging issues in linguistics
- Chapter 13. Cyclical change in affixal negation 225
- Chapter 14. Code-mixing and semantico-pragmatic resources in francophone Maine 243
- Chapter 15. Exceptionality and ungrammaticality in Spanish stress 257
- Index 273
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Acknowledgements vii
- Introduction 1
-
A. Interfaces
- Chapter 1. Picard subject clitics 11
- Chapter 2. A child’s view of Romance modification 35
- Chapter 3. Definite determiners in Romance 57
-
B. Bridging issues at the CP-TP-vP levels
- Chapter 4. Differential object marking, oblique morphology, and enriched case hierarchies 81
- Chapter 5. A deletion account of referential null objects in Basque Spanish 97
- Chapter 6. Same EPP, different null subject type 111
- Chapter 7. On (un)grammatical sequences of se s in Spanish 127
- Chapter 8. On the interpretation of the Spanish 1st person plural pronoun 143
-
C. Bridging issues at the PP-DP levels
- Chapter 9. French ne … que exceptives in prepositional contexts 163
- Chapter 10. Interpreting reduplicated numerals in Old Ibero-Romance 177
- Chapter 11. Value and cardinality in the evaluation of bare singulars in Brazilian Portuguese 193
- Chapter 12. Formality by distance in Spanish and Catalan 207
-
D. Bridging issues in linguistics
- Chapter 13. Cyclical change in affixal negation 225
- Chapter 14. Code-mixing and semantico-pragmatic resources in francophone Maine 243
- Chapter 15. Exceptionality and ungrammaticality in Spanish stress 257
- Index 273
