Reflections of social structures in forms of honorifics in language

Abstract

Much of the scholarly interest in language descriptions solely focuses on either the social aspects of languages or on the structural nature of languages. However, they are equally important and intertwined to each other; therefore, they should not be examined separately. Honorific systems and polite forms in some languages are thought to be treated in this sense. The polite forms or honorific systems in a language especially languages such as Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean and Tamil constitute a genre of a discourse in which we observe the social rankings of the speaker, listener and the person mentioned in the conversation. This genre of speech suggests that the social structure of some societies motivates a good amount of language discourse that determines the usage and shift of different linguistic levels such as phonology, lexicon and grammar. The primary goal of this study is to draw attention to such structures in genetically unrelated languages and thus show that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis may not fully describe those structures in the languages examined here.