Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics
honorific [Lat. honorificus ‘showing honor’] (also honorative)
Grammatical encoding of the social position and the level of intimacy between the speaker, the hearer, and others; more specifically, honorifics grammatically encode a higher social status. This can be seen in Romance languages such as French in the choice between vous and tu, German Sie vs du, as well as in English in the choice between first name or title+last name (Bill vs President Clinton vs Mr President).
In many languages there are morphological paradigms for various subcategories, e.g. in Japanese with verb inflection. (
also pronominal form of address)
References
Brown, P and S.Levinson. 1978. Politeness: some universals in language usage. Cambridge.
politeness
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