Our sixth-year PhD student Margaret Wang was an invited speaker at the 3rd workshop on Charting Honorific and Addressee Morphosyntactic Processes (CHAMP3) held at Universitat Pompeu Fabra from March 28 to 29, 2025. Her talk was entitled “Politeness as a part-time vocation for vacuous linguistic forms”, and here is the abstract:
This talk will describe and explain how various expressions of politeness, whether phi-featural or
not, are recruited as such. Presenting various diagnostics, I argue that semantic vacuousness is a
necessary condition for forms recruited for the task of politeness. Invoking typological
asymmetries and economy principles, the talk will also make the case for politeness necessarily
being a part-time vocation (arising only via pragmatic principles), instead of a full-time one
(which would involve dedicated linguistic features).