Respect and the 3rd Person in a Multilingual Perspective

Abstract

Research on politeness has been proliferating for nearly four decades now, drawing on crosslinguistic data from a wide range of spoken and written languages and focusing on pragmatic, syntactic and grammatical features. Speech acts such as apologies and requests have been investigated as well as grammatical, i.e. morphological, morphosyntactic, and lexical forms of honorific systems, expressions of politeness, respect and disrespect. However, while discussions and research centering on the notion of face have been exceptionally numerous, the grammatical category of respect has not yet received as much attention, since Haase (1994), with the exception of Simon (2003). The present collection on "Respect and the 3rd person: Cross-linguistic Perspectives on Respect and Politeness" originated in the discussions in our panel at the DGfS annual meeting in 2009 on "Forms of expressing politeness / respect in discourse: Talking about a third party in different languages and varieties". The articles comprising this volume strive to expand our insights into the complex intersection between grammatical respect (i.e. linguistic features in morphology and/or morphosyntax), lexical expressions and discourse phenomena of politeness cross-linguistically, with special regard to the treatment of third-person non-participants and bystanders. Our aim is to shed new light on respect and politeness phenomena as well as on the relation between respect as a systematic category on the one hand and politeness as an outcome of linguistic interaction on the other.

Qui Honoris Causa Nominatur

“…. The notion of bystander is taken fromGoffman (1981), who distinguishes in his study of 'forms of talk', among others, '(ratified) participants' and 'bystanders'.16 For this type of third person references, cf Jekat & Hohenstein (2012)…”