Linguistik Online (Jan 2012)

Politeness as a feature: so important and so rare

  • Corbett, Greville G.

Journal volume & issue
Vol. 51, no. 1
pp. 9 – 27

Abstract

Read online

Politeness has a major place in many languages, and is remarkably pervasive in some. Yet we rarely find respect as a morphosyntactic feature, alongside gender, person, number and case. I document this imbalance, and then ask why this is what we find.