EXTRA: Pritha Chandra (IIT Delhi)

The Syntax of Politeness in Eastern Indo-Aryan

Recent years have seen considerable research around the representation of discourse-related constructs such as Speech Act Participants, politeness/honorificity etc in the syntactic tree (cf. Speas and Tenny 2003; Miyagawa 2012; Portner et al 2019; Wiltschko 2021). Two specific concerns that one often finds in the literature are about (i) the structure of the Speech Act Projection located in the left periphery and (ii) the mechanisms underlying honorificity agreement.

In this talk, I present data from some Indo-Aryan languages that provide interesting insights on both (i) and (ii). Using data from Bangla, I argue for a more nuanced SAP, positing two commitment phrases, each catering to the Speaker and the Addressee. By doing so, I add one extra projection to the SAP posited by Miyagawa and Hill (2023). I then go on to talk about referent honorificity, allocutivity and their interaction in three different EIA languages – Maithili, Magahi and Bangla. The patterns clearly attest that the locus of both kinds of honorificity agreement is T. However, there is considerable cross-linguistic variation that arises from the differential featural composition of T within the EIA sub-family, affecting not just how honorificity agreement is realised, but with repercussions for other domains of grammars.