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12.3
Semantics of (Im)politeness
The theory outlined in this section is developed more extensively elsewhere (Vogel
2014a
). This presentation draws upon that account.
12.3.1
The Semantic Model
The denotations of linguistic expressions of politeness and impoliteness are events
that are constrained by predications of relative offence as experienced by the speaker
of those expressions in relation to the participants in the triggering events.
15
Treating
such events, which are accompanied by relations among their participants, as the
denotation of expressions of (im)politeness allows for semantic and pragmatic
analysis to make reference to a shared ontology. Pragmatic inference about an
utterance will also make reference to the events that are in the denotation of the
utterance.
It is useful to characterize relevant properties of event types as in (
12.14
), treating
events as particulars which instantiate the type.
16
An event token
e
of the type
e
makes relevant relations among arguments true and has certain other properties as
specified. Events have temporality, tense, aspect, and mode (
realis
or
irrealis
). Any
event token
e
will fix values for these features, according to the level of granularity
with which it is viewed.
17
Events are taken to have proto-agents and proto-patients
(see Dowty
1991
). Syntactic person is used to characterize the fillers of these proto-
roles, the event participants. Events have
use
and
cost
for each participant. A three-
valued polarity system (with 1 representing positive value, 0 representing neutral
value, and
1
representing negative value) may be deployed within simple calculus
of use and cost to establish a
net
value. Table
12.1
provides a possible specification
of the combination of values of
use
and
cost
to yield
net
values.
15
See (
12.27
)and(
12.28
) for characterization of the sets of events denoted by impoliteness
and politeness expressions, respectively. The next paragraphs explain the terms used by those
characterizations. Taking denotations of expressions to be sets of events may be compared with
treatments of modality that analyze propositions as sets of possible worlds (Kratzer
1981
) or with
situation theoretic approaches to meaning that take denotations to be sets of supporting situations
(Cohen
2009
).
16
Feature-value matrices provide an effective visual organization of bundles of first-order descrip-
tions. See Kasper and Rounds (
1986
)andCarpenter(
1992
) for details of some feature logics and
equations on paths through feature-value structures.
17
Formal models that enable variable granularity in analysis of events exist (Fernando
2013
).
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