Zanuttini et al. (2012) claim that all imperatives host the Jussive head, an imperative-specific 2nd person projection which agrees with the subject to restrict it to the addressee. This paper argues against the proposed link between clause type and addressee encoding by examining imperatives with allocutivity in Punjabi which exhibit two unique properties: first, these imperatives lack 2nd person imperative agreement and appear instead with allocutivity, which is available across clause-types. Secondly, they can only be used in contexts with a specific addressee, whose (non)-honorific status vis-à-vis the speaker is well-defined. I argue that allocutivity in Punjabi does not underlie an additional person probe distinct from the subject agreement probe. Instead, there is a unique person probe in the C-T domain, labeled Pers 0 , which agrees with the addressee/Adr upon failing to agree with the subject. Extending this syntax of allocutivity to imperatives, the presence of obligatory allocutivity in the imperative underlies a unique Pers 0 , which in the absence of a co-occurring person probe, i.e. the Jussive head, mediates an agreement relation between the Adr and the minimally specified pro subject to restrict the latter to the addressee. Furthermore, I show that the allocutive head/Pers 0 is distinct from the Jussive head in that it not only hosts a 2nd person feature, but also a [status] feature which encodes the speaker-addressee relation. Valuation of both these features by the Adr restricts allocutive imperatives to specific addressee contexts.
This paper introduces two instances of person effects with 3 rd person items-the reflexive clitic se in French and the non-honorific clitic pronoun suu in Punjabi. Examining the properties of these items, we argue against the phi-feature based accounts of person licensing. Instead, we re-conceptualize it as a syntactico-semantic phenomenon, which requires a pronominal to be contextually-anchored via a feature labeled [F]. More globally, this paper attempts to work out the special status of person and articulate why person requires special licensing in grammar. Keywords licensing, person, reflexives, anchoring, agreement 1 We are extremely grateful to audiences at LinG1 (Universität Göttingen) and SinFonIJA 11 (Jagiellonian University, Krakow) for their valuable feedback on this paper. Special thanks are due to Hedde Zeijlstra for his guidance throughout the project. We would also like to thank the editor of this volume Ewa Willim, and the two anonymous reviewers whose comments helped improve the paper greatly. We acknowledge the funding received from the Alexander von Humboldt foundation by Gurmeet Kaur, and from the DFG (project SU 835/1 ZE 1040/3) by Louise Raynaud. All remaining errors are our own.
This paper examines honorific mismatches between the allocutive marker and a 2P pronoun within a clause in Japanese. Unlike allocutive languages such as Tamil, Punjabi, Magahi, among others, which require obligatory matching in honorificity (and phi-features) between the allocutive marker and a 2P pronoun in a clause, Japanese allows the honorific allocutive marker to also occur with a non-honorific 2P pronoun. These mismatching structures can be interpreted both literally and sarcastically. We provide a two-step analysis to explain such mismatches: first, we claim that 2P pronouns in Japanese are lexical items, which cannot participate in syntactic binding to inherit their honorific features from a left-peripheral honorific head (e.g., c). Instead, they enter syntax with pre-specified honorific information. Allocutive markers, by contrast, obtain their honorificity in syntax, typically via agreement. Consequently, nothing in syntax forces matching between 2P pronouns and allocutive markers. Secondly, mismatching instances are also not ruled out in the pragmatic component because the meanings encoded by the 2P pronouns and the allocutive marker in Japanese are not comparable, and contribute independently to the meaning of the entire sentence. The honorific information encoded in pronouns is the speaker’s positive/negative attitude towards the addressee based on his/her evaluation of the addressee, while the allocutive marker encodes the speaker’s intent to be polite, irrespective of the evaluation of the addressee, who may even remain unidentified. It is possible for these two meanings to be expressed simultaneously in select conversational set-ups, leading to felicitous mismatching structures in the language.
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