Politeness Pressure on Grammar: The Case of First and Second Person Pronouns and Address Terms in Korean

Grammar is constantly emergent as an aggregate whole of discourse tendencies that are present in language use between interlocutors, hence the notion ‘emergent grammar’ (Hopper 1987). These tendencies are formed by diverse discursive needs, including the need to signal politeness, which is assumed to be universal (Brown and Levinson 1987). This need is particularly important in Korean, in which politeness is highly grammaticalized, i.e., the politeness marking is not only a pragmatic but grammatical issue. The two areas where the speaker’s decision is most clearly visible are the choice of sentence-enders, modulated up to six levels, and the choice of personal reference, e.g., pronouns and address terms. This study is a diachronic investigation of the personal reference system in Korean, exploring the effect of pressure of politeness. Despite the high level of grammaticalization of politeness marking, the personal reference system is a highly unstable paradigm, i.e., it has not undergone a high level of ‘paradigmaticization’ (Lehmann 1995 [1982]). Since personal reference terms are highly variable, the speakers often avoid using them for fear of the addressee perceiving that the choice is of insufficient honorification or that the very act of using reference terms is impolite when they could be omitted. Furthermore, personal reference terms with the [+Honorific] feature constantly deteriorate through frequent use. Therefore, a look into Korean reference terms shows that [+Honorific] terms are constantly innovated to upgrade the diminishing honorification effect and the first-person reference terms are constantly innovated to strengthen the [+Humiliative] meaning.

A dynamic network analysis of emergent grammar

For languages to survive as complex cultural systems, they need to be learnable. According to traditional approaches, learning is made possible by constraining the degrees of freedom in advance of experience and by the construction of complex structure during development. This article explores a third contributor to complexity: namely, the extent to which syntactic structure can be an emergent property of how simpler entities – words – interact with one another. The authors found that when naturalistic child directed speech was instantiated in a dynamic network, communities formed around words that were more densely connected with other words than they were with the rest of the network. This process is designed to mirror what we know about distributional patterns in natural language: namely, the network communities represented the syntactic hubs of semi-formulaic slot-and-frame patterns, characteristic of early speech. The network itself was blind to grammatical information and its organization reflected (a) the frequency of using a word and (b) the probabilities of transitioning from one word to another. The authors show that grammatical patterns in the input disassociate by community structure in the emergent network. These communities provide coherent hubs which could be a reliable source of syntactic information for the learner. These initial findings are presented here as proof-of-concept in the hope that other researchers will explore the possibilities and limitations of this approach on a larger scale and with more languages. The implications of a dynamic network approach are discussed for the learnability burden and the development of an adult-like grammar.

Multimodal existential constructions in German: Manual actions of giving as experiential substrate for grammatical and gestural patterns

Taking an Emergent Grammar (Hopper 1998) approach to multimodal usage events in face-to-face interaction, this paper suggests that basic scenes of experience tend to motivate entrenched patterns in both language and gesture (Fillmore 1977; Goldberg 1998; Langacker 1987). Manual actions and interactions with the material and social world, such as giving or holding, have been shown to serve as substrate for prototypical ditransitive and transitive constructions in language (Goldberg 1995). It is proposed here that they may also underpin multimodal instantiations of existential construsctions in German discourse, namely, instances of the es gibt ‘it gives’ (there is/are) construction (Newman 1998) that co-occur with schematic gestural enactments of giving or holding something. Analyses show that gestural existential markers tend to combine referential and pragmatic functions. They exhibit a muted degree of indexicality, pointing to the existence of absent or abstract discourse contents that are central to the speaker’s subjective expressivity. Furthermore, gestural existential markers show characteristics of grammaticalization processes in spoken and signed languages (Bybee 2013; Givón 1985; Haiman 1994; Hopper and Traugott 2003). A multimodal construction grammar needs to account for how linguistic constructions combine with gestural patterns into commonly used cross-modal clusters in different languages and contexts of use.