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Article published In:
Concepts and Context in Relevance-Theoretic Pragmatics: New Developments
Edited by Agnieszka Piskorska and Manuel Padilla Cruz
[Pragmatics 33:3] 2023
► pp. 486–504

Has madam read Wilson (2016)?

A procedural account of the T/V forms in Polish

ORCID logo | University of Warsaw

This paper offers an account of Polish addressative forms encoding deference and familiarity in terms of the relevance-theoretic notion of procedural meaning, which underlies a heterogeneous range of phenomena linked to different cognitive domains. The procedure encoded by pronouns used referentially can be seen as targeting the domain of inferential comprehension and contributing to the truth-conditional meaning of an utterance by identifying a referent of a pronoun. It is claimed here that addressative forms marking the politeness distinction encode another procedure, targeting the social cognition module and activating the hearer’s readiness to identify the form as (in)congruent with social norms. It is argued that the politeness element in addressative forms does not involve conceptual encoding. The potential of the T/V forms for giving rise to stylistic effects is also explored. It is suggested that the proposal can be extended to other languages with the T/V distinction.

Keywords: politeness, T/V pronouns, procedural meaning, addressative forms, modularity, social cognition module
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Procedures and the modularity of mind
    • 2.1Characteristic features of procedural items
    • 2.2Massive modularity and procedural items
  • 3.Pronouns as procedural and truth-functional items
  • 4.Addressative forms in Polish as expressions of social deixis
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 14 November 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.21073.pis
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