Has madam read Wilson (2016)? A procedural account of the T/V forms in Polish

Agnieszka Piskorska
University of Warsaw
Abstract

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:
Publication history

Date received: 20 December 2021

Date accepted: 28 September 2022

Published online: 14 November 2022

Table of contents

Being a cognitively oriented framework, relevance theory has not been extensively applied to the analysis of politeness phenomena. The few exceptions include the work of Jary (1998), Escandell-Vidal (1998, 2004), Padilla Cruz (2007) and Mazarella (2015). This paper makes a contribution to this largely unchartered territory by offering an account of addressative forms in Polish, focusing on the distinction between those that encode closeness between interlocutors (ty + a 2nd person verb form; an equivalent of the T form in the T/V opposition) and those that encode deference (pan/pani + a 3rd person singular verb; an equivalent of the V form in the T/V opposition). The account proposed herein relies solely on the already available relevance-theoretic toolkit and offers an extension of the treatment of pronouns to the realm of social deixis, as defined by Levinson (1979). By confining the scope of the paper to a single politeness-related phenomenon, I intend to align with the trend in 21st-century politeness research that prioritizes first-order politeness phenomena over second-order theoretical constructs (see Terkourafi 2019 for an overview).

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