The interface of metaphor and morphosyntax: honorific address in Russian and Czech

In this paper I present an analysis of predicate agreement with honorific vy that will account for the differences in morphology that appear when a single person is addressed with a plural pronoun . The nature of the agreement relationship can be captured by expressing cognitive motivations within a formal theory of grammar (Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, or HPSG). First, though, we must ask: what is vy? Why is it logical that we address one person in the plural? Indeed, it is logical at all?

Let us consider the notion of metaphor and language use. Metaphor, as defined by Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 3), is not simply a literary device. Metaphor, i.e. defining one thing in terms of something else, "is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature." Metaphors, then, "structure how we perceive, how we think, and what we do" (Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 4).

The use of plural pronouns in the addressing function can be viewed in terms of metaphor. In Russian and Czech, orientation metaphors motivate pronominal usage. For instance, one metaphor used to structure pronoun choice in the addressing function is MORE IS UP. MORE IS UP relates specifically to plurality (since PLURAL IS MORE) and to plural pronouns used to address a single person. STATUS, especially HIGH STATUS (which is UP) has traditionally been considered an important factor in determining address between two speakers. If MORE IS UP and HIGH STATUS IS UP, we can conclude that HIGH STATUS IS MORE, or at least that MORE and HIGH STATUS are coherent aspects of the notion of UP. The concept UP reveals conceptual structures essential to understanding how the use of the plural pronoun vy is motivated. That is, to address someone who is UP (higher status) relative to us, we make him MORE, i.e., plural. Essentially, then, singular, honorific vy is the metaphorical counterpart to plural (literal) vy.

What does this mean, though, for agreement and HPSG? Why might HPSG be an ideal theory to account for the (sometimes messy) agreement issues involved with address with polite pronouns? In my presentation I will explain much more fully (and technically) how and why this can be represented in HPSG and why traditional grammars (such as Government and Binding) are not adequate. Przepiórkowski (2000: 8) notes that "HPSG does not attempt to reduce agreement within natural languages to pure syntax or pure semantics; instead…syntactic, semantic, and, indeed, pragmatic factors play a role in various agreement phenomena." In fact, there are even ways to represent cognitive factors, such as the use of metaphor, in this formalism as well. Indeed, I believe it is precisely because HPSG can accommodate cognitive motivations that the nature of the agreement relationship may be more accurately described within this theory.

Again, the use of a plural pronoun to express honor is metaphorically motivated, I contend, by speakers' concepts of spatial orientation (UP-DOWN, for instance); metaphorical vy has the same syntactic features that literal vy has, but the semantics of the metaphorical pronoun are overwritten in the case that honor is owed to an individual. That is, following Riehemann's (1997) use of an overwrite operator, I suggest that, as she proposes for idioms, the semantics of plural (literal) vy can be overwritten when vy is used metaphorically, i.e., to address an individual. The metaphorical (honorific) vy has the same syntactic properties as plural vy; what is overwritten is the semantics of the pronoun. The operator states that metaphorical vy is just like the literal vy, except for the properties of the semantics that have been changed.

In Russian and Czech, this 'overwrite' of semantics can be manifested in two ways: first, elements of the predicate can have their own semantics overwritten and simply agree "syntactically" with the pronoun, in which case there are no feature mismatches . Alternatively, the predicate, or part of the predicate, can have an agreement relationship with the pronoun's index, in which case the real-world gender and number of the addressee is encoded in the morphology . The constituents of the predicate that exhibit morphosyntactic agreement with the pronoun have, like honorific vy, their semantics overwritten to indicate their form is being used metaphorically. Kathol's (1997) analysis of the morphology- syntax interface and the agreement relationship, on which much of this paper is based, is particularly well suited to languages such as Russian and Czech which have a great deal of morphology. More broadly, HPSG is a formalism that can accommodate even cognitive motivations for the syntactic problems caused by vy-address.

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