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Honorificity, Indexicality and Their Interaction in Magahi

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Honorificity, Indexicality and Their Interaction in Magahi SPEAKER AND ADDRESSEE IN NATURAL LANGUAGE: HONORIFICITY, INDEXICALITY AND THEIR INTERACTION IN MAGAHI BY DEEPAK ALOK A dissertation submitted to the School of Graduate Studies Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Linguistics Written under the direction of Mark Baker and Veneeta Dayal and approved by New Brunswick, New Jersey October, 2020 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Speaker and Addressee in Natural Language: Honorificity, Indexicality and their Interaction in Magahi By Deepak Alok Dissertation Director: Mark Baker and Veneeta Dayal Natural language uses first and second person pronouns to refer to the speaker and addressee. This dissertation takes as its starting point the view that speaker and addressee are also implicated in sentences that do not have such pronouns (Speas and Tenny 2003). It investigates two linguistic phenomena: honorification and indexical shift, and the interactions between them, andshow that these discourse participants have an important role to play. The investigation is based on Magahi, an Eastern Indo-Aryan language spoken mainly in the state of Bihar (India), where these phenomena manifest themselves in ways not previously attested in the literature. The phenomena are analyzed based on the native speaker judgements of the author along with judgements of one more native speaker, and sometimes with others as the occasion has presented itself. Magahi shows a rich honorification system (the encoding of “social status” in grammar) along several interrelated dimensions. Not only 2nd person pronouns but 3rd person pronouns also morphologically mark the honorificity of the referent with respect to the speaker. Agreement ii morphology also tracks honorification in the form of subject agreement and a special typeof allocutive/addressee agreement. Addressee agreement in Magahi is unique in that it is found in all kinds of finite embedded clauses, showing evidence against the standard claim that addressee agreement is a root clause phenomenon (Miyagawa 2012, 2017 and others). I take every finite clause to syntactically represent the speaker (SP) and the addressee (ADD), as co-ordinates of FinP (cf. Bhadra 2017), in addition, I argue that all DPs have a semantic honorificity feature (e.g., iHON), which has a relational semantics (cf. Portner et al. 2019a), where one of its arguments is the DP it attaches to. The second argument is a variable bound by the closest SP coordinate foundinFinP. Thus, each DP expresses its social status relative to the speaker, independently of other DPsinthe clause. This differs from accounts such as Portner et al. (2019a), where honorification isfixedonce and for all at the level of the clause. Subject agreement/honorification is a result of T agreeing with the subject and Addressee agreement/honorification is a result of Fin agreeing with theADD coordinate. The relatively complex patterns of honorification in nominal and verbal domainsare explained within this system under a unified account. The other phenomenon investigated is Indexical Shift. First and second person pronouns in Magahi can optionally shift under anattitude verb to refer to the higher subject and object. What is interesting about Magahi is the interaction of indexical shift with honorific marking on other elements such as 2nd person pronouns,3rd person pronouns and addressee agreement. They also shift when there is indexical shift. Thereare other complex interactions between the two that are covered. A key distinction that plays a role in the explanation is between binding of person pronouns via SP and ADD co-ordinates of Fin (cf., Baker 2008) by the arguments of the immediately higher predicate, mediated by the attitude verb (von Stechow 2003), vs binding by matrix SP and ADD co-ordinates. Because indexicality and honorification are both sensitive to binding, complex interactions between them are predicted. The domain of investigation includes declarative clauses as well as interrogatives and imperatives. Honorificity and indexical shift have been studied in a large number of languages atthispoint and there is a sizable literature on their syntactic and semantic properties. This dissertation, iii in addition to accounting for honorificity and indexicality in a previously unstudied language, highlights the advantages of studying these two phenomena together. It thus argues for a more intrinsic connection between honorificity and indexicality in the grammar of natural language. iv Acknowledgements This dissertation would be impossible to finish without the assistance, support, and encourage- ment of many people. Today, I would like to acknowledge them. I start with my committee members: Mark Baker, Veneeta Dayal, Troy Messick, and Paul Portner. I was fortunate to have had Mark Baker and Veneeta Dayal as chairs of my dissertation com- mittee. This work would not be a dissertation without their excellent supervision. Theywere the reason I joined Rutgers to start my graduate life. Thanks is not enough for them. Mark and Veneeta have been the advisors I always wanted. They were so generous with their time, always available for a meeting. They read innumerable drafts related to the dissertation. Their comments, criticisms, and suggestions benefited this dissertation greatly. Mark, thank you for your generos- ity and pushing me to be a good linguist. Veneeta Ma’am, you were more than an advisor. I am very grateful for your love, care, and lesson to not just be a good linguist but also a good human being. I also consider myself fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with both of you as a co-author. You are excellent collaborators. When I joined Rutgers in 2014, Troy Messick was not there. He came when I was writing my dissertation proposal. I was pleased when he agreed to become a part of the committee. Meetings with Troy were always insightful and enjoyable. Some of the references he recommended were very helpful. Troy, I thank you for being supportive of throughout this dissertation. You are also a great collaborator. I was delighted when Paul Portner said yes to join the committee. Paul became a part of the committee very late, and I did not have that many meetings with him, but all of thosethatIhad v were very helpful. The semantics that I developed in chapter 2 on honorification is duetohim.I am much thankful to him for his time and insightful discussion. I also like to thank my earlier linguistic mentors Ayesha Kidwai, Anil Thakur, Sanjukta Ghosh and Rambaksh Mishra. They are the reason I got to, and stayed in, linguistics. Ayesha wasmy MPhil supervisor at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). I consider myself very lucky that I have had her as a supervisor and came to know her personally. She is not only an incredible linguist but also a wonderful person. I learnt a lot from her. I cannot forget her love and care that I received since I got to know her. I wish every university has teachers like you, and every student finds a supervisor like you. Anil Thakur, Sanjukta Ghosh and Rambaksh Mishra were my first linguistics teacher at Banaras Hindu University (BHU). They inspired me a lot in my early graduate life, and they were the reason I am in linguistics. Thank you for your love, support, and encouragement. Another linguist that I would like to thank is Rajesh Bhatt. I first met him in a student conference when I was in the undergraduate program. Since then, I feel like I am his student as well. I can never forget his help and support. Thank you, Rajesh! I would also like to express my gratitude to other faculty members at Rutgers, who taught me fantastic linguistics classes and played an important role in my professional development. Thanks to Jane Grimshaw, Akinbiyi Akinlabi, Ken Safir, José Camacho, Simon Charlow, Paul de Lacy, Vi- viane Déprez, Kristen Syrett, Bruce Tesar, and Yimei Xiang. I would also like to thank someother teachers who are outside of Rutgers but teach me something new whenever we meet. Thanks to Bill Haddican, Raffaella Zanuttini, and Miok Pak. Meetings with them were very insightful. I thank my awesome cohort Augustina Owusu, Morgan Moyer, Livia Souza, and Nick Winter, and my fellow students Matt, Naga, Vandana, Mingming, Diti, Vera, Jess (and Haoze), Ümit, Eason, Shu-hao, Kunio, Yağmur, Beibei Xu. The first three years were easier because of you guys. Special thanks to two of my special friends at Rutgers Tajudeen Mamadou and Sreekar Raghotham. Man, the last three years were easier because of you! I am very lucky to get to know both of you. vi I would also like to thank some of my other fellow students: Hazel, Eileen, Ang, Lydia, Shiori, Chris, Nate, Chen, Akane, Meg, Jill, Chaoyi, Huteng, Indira, Natasha, Ziling and Tatevik. Thanks to all the non-teaching staff in the department for their continuous support incom- pleting the official formalities throughout these years. Special thanks to Marilyn Reyes forher help and kindness. I would also like to acknowledge all the financial support that I received during my PhDat Rutgers. It would not be possible to constitute my study without the three years of excellence fellowship, one year of Teaching Assistantships, one year of Part-Time Teaching at Rutgers and the special funding that I got from Taraknath Das Foundation. Outside of Rutgers, I would like to thank Rahul Balusu, Ishani Guha, Sakshi Bhatia, Jyoti Iyer, Akita Yamada, Gurmeet Kaur, Deepak Kumar, Ritesh Kumar, Mayank Jain, Bornini Lahiri, Gaurav Tripathi, Rivi jee, Gopal jee, Sriniket kumar Mishra, and Neelu Tiwari. Although I am a native speaker of Magahi, this dissertation would not have been possible without Anand Abhishek, Shanshank Shekhar and Shekhar Jyoti. Special thanks to Anand Ab- hishek for additional data and judgments. I want to thank all my family members, especially my grandparents, my mother, my bhaiyaa and my wife, who sacrificed a lot and allowed me to enhance myself academically and getan excellent education.
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