Abstract
Although much has been written about polite forms of address in Slavic, the grammatical expression of respect for a person that does not take part in the conversation has hitherto received little to no attention. Yet this type of honorific reference is widely found in the Slavic languages, especially in dialects and substandard varieties. In the present article I shall distinguish between three types of honorific reference to a person spoken about and focus on the type that I think is most current in Slavic dialects, viz. honorific reference to elder relatives, and, by extension, other familiar older persons and priests. I shall first present an analysis of the use of the construction and the kind of respect involved. One of the characteristics that make this honorific plural interesting from a typological point of view is that it is primarily used for respected persons the speaker has an in-group relationship with: if there is too much ‘horizontal distance’ it is not used. Then I shall give a picture of the distribution of this type of honorific third person plural across the Slavic language area. It will become clear that it is found across a more or less continuous area from Slovene in the southwest to central Ukrainian in the northeast.
Highlights
The phenomenon that will be discussed in this article drew my attention a couple of years ago when I was working on the Croatian dialects of the Burgenland and its surroundings.1. It is the use of the third person plural when referring to a single person who is respected by the speaker:2 (1) Njeguov otadz už vig živu, sat su sedamdesiet lit stari.3 live.pres.3pl; be.pres.3pl; old.masc.pl
Soon afterwards I started to look for examples of this honorific plural in other Slavic language varieties, first in those spoken in the neighborhood of Burgenland Croatian, but I soon expanded my area of research, as it became clear that it could be found in a considerable part of the Slavic linguistic area, more often in dialects and substandard variants than in the literary languages, and mostly in the speech of the oldest generations
In this article I treat HON3pl-A and HON3pl-C as similar but different, often cooccurring phenomena. This is because in most Slavic dialects in which I found HON3pl-A, I found no examples of socially higher placed persons being referred to using a third person plural, and, reversely, in the German and Russian speech varieties discussed above it does not seem possible to refer to one’s mother using a honorific third person plural
Summary
The phenomenon that will be discussed in this article drew my attention a couple of years ago when I was working on the Croatian dialects of the Burgenland and its surroundings. It is the use of the third person plural when referring to a single person who is respected by the speaker:. The phenomenon that will be discussed in this article drew my attention a couple of years ago when I was working on the Croatian dialects of the Burgenland and its surroundings.1 It is the use of the third person plural when referring to a single person who is respected by the speaker:. Soon afterwards I started to look for examples of this honorific plural in other Slavic language varieties, first in those spoken in the neighborhood of Burgenland Croatian, but I soon expanded my area of research, as it became clear that it could be found in a considerable part of the Slavic linguistic area, more often in dialects and substandard variants than in the literary languages, and mostly in the speech of the oldest generations This construction in Slavic gives rise to a number of questions:. I intend to come back to the questions listed under (d) in future publications
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