Conference on Honorifics to be held at Reed College, in mid-April l988.

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This is an award to provide airfare, meals, and lodging for twelve participants at a conference on honorifics at Reed College. Participants, whose research extends over syntax, semantics, morphology, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and the ethnography of speaking, will discuss the adequate description and the theoretical significance of categories in language that express respect and disrespect. Languages and language groups to be discussed include Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Thai, Tibetan, Mesoamerican Indian languages, North American Indian languages, African languages, languages of India, and Western European languages. Languages express relative status of speaker and hearer and attitude toward the topic of discussion in many ways such as the use of special vocabulary, pronouns, affixes, or euphemisms and circulocutions. In some languages the speaker is required to make choices and evaluations for every utterance, while in others there are neutral ways of speaking that avoid expression of relative status or attitude. Descriptions of languages often omit this aspect of usage, since it has little to do with propositional content or abstract grammaticality. However, a grammatical sentence is not necessarily an appropriate sentence. Recently linguists have become concerned with cross-linguistic studies of the mechanisms of polite speech.