Re: Second person/polite pronouns (fuit Re: Another Ozymandias)

Jonathan Knibb, On 30/07/2006 10:30:
> T4 has a rather complicated system of pronouns - I must have been in
> an odd mood that day. There are three relevant variables, which I
> refer to as "familiarity" (F), "authority" (A) and "servility" (S).
>
> Familiarity is the simplest, and takes only two values. One is used
> exclusively for second person, while the other generally means first
>  person, except that in relationships of great intimacy (typically
> spouses or close relatives) the first-person form may be used for
> second person as well (A and S are sufficient to disambiguate).
How do A and S disambiguate? One would expect them to be symmetrical &
default/neutral in intimate relationships...

> Authority and servility each take three values, low, default and
> high. The prototypical relationship in which authority is
> asymmetrical is parent-child, so that the parent would call the child
> by a low-A (first-person, remember) pronoun and the child would use a
> high-A pronoun for the parent. Referring to themselves when talking
> to each other, the child would use low A and the parent high A, in
> effect "agreeing" with each other on the values of A in the
> relationship. Other relationships with asymmetrical A include
> teacher-pupil, doctor-patient, etc. If the relationship is
> symmetrical with respect to A, both speakers simply use default A for
> themselves and each other.
What about High1--High2, Low1--Low2, High1--Default2, D1--H2, L1--D2,
D1--L2?

> The prototype for asymmetrical S is the master-servant relationship.
>  This is where it gets really complicated. :) In principle, there
> could be a full-servility situation parallel to the full-authority
> situation I described, where both speakers (X and Y) use high-S
> pronouns for X and low-S pronouns for Y. However, this is very
> unusual. For example, the default situation is *not* simply default S
> all round - you use default S for the other person but low S for
> yourself, as if saying "I acknowledge that you're not trying to
> dominate me but I am at your service nonetheless." If the other
> person agrees that the situation is one of symmetrical S, he will of
> course refer to you with default S and to himself with low S.
>
> On the other hand, if the relationship is genuinely asymmetrical with
>  respect to servility, humble speaker X will use low S for himself
> and high S for his less humble interlocutor Y. Y now has a tricky
> choice to make. He may wish to agree with X that the situation is
> asymmetrical, in which case he will use low S for X but only default
> S for himself (as in the default situation, he has to stay one step
> below X's opinion of him to maintain basic politeness). Or he may
> wish to give X the idea that he sees the situation differently, in
> which case he may either adopt a completely default posture (low S
> for self, default S for other), or a compromise (default S for both).
So High S 1st person would always be imperious/haughty? What would
the difference between H1--L2 and H1--D2 be?

Do incongruous combinations of F, A and S exist? If so, are they left
unused due to their incongruity and lack of applicability to
circumstances in normal life? Or are they exapted into some more utile
function?

There are aspects of the T4 system that remind me variously of Livagian and of a
BDSM conlang that Mark Shoulson once advertised on Conlang. I don't remember
any details of the BDSM conlang (-- it must have been yonks ago, because Mark
Shoulson hasn't been around on Conlang for yonks), but I do remember that it
tried to systematize the very complex parameters of the multifarious kinds of
power exchange involved in BDSM (-- always, I find, fascinating to think about,
even if not to practise).

As for Livagian, instead of personal pronouns it has 3 place predicates, the
arguments being (i) the speaker, (ii) the addressee, and (iii) the set
containing speaker and addressee. The predicates' stems form paradigms that can
express such things as degrees of openness/familiarity, of authority &
servility, and so forth. (I can't cite sample examples, because the whereabouts
of my paper files containing them have become lost to memory.) While the
paradigms themselves would be of interest to the present discussion for what
they encode, the main point I am making here is that (a) deictic meanings
(which would include 1st/2nd person honorifics) come from the one open
wordclass, so are themselves potentially unlimited in quantity, and (b) the
deictic predicates lend themselves to expressing kinds of relationship between
speaker and addressee.

--And.