Last week, Ruoan Wang successfully defended her dissertation entitled Proxies and Social Meaning! Below is Ruoan’s abstract:
This dissertation presents an analysis of polite meaning as part of a pragmatic calculus, without dedicated features in the core grammar. I present a purpose-built typology (n>200) showing that polite pronouns often have no inherent form of their own, instead piggybacking on certain phi-featural values targeted for recruitment, resulting in recruitment asymmetries in the shapes of polite proxies (PL but not SG; 3 but not 1/2; INCL but not EXCL). I argue asymmetries result because only certain grammatical forms are well-suited for linguistically manifesting the anthropological notion of negative politeness (Brown & Levinson 1987): respecting an interlocutor’s right “to freedom of action and freedom from imposition”. A polite context is thus a context where speakers avoid making assumptions about their interlocutor(s), where only number- and/or person-neutral forms may surface.
Such a pragmatic approach is shown to deliver results. First, the number- and/or person-neutrality of polite proxies is independently supported by the shapes of semantic defaults. Second, the machinations of the recruitment mechanism are illuminated by an Optimality-Theoretic analysis which delivers a factorial typology that perfectly mirrors the typological nuances within recruitment asymmetries.
Here are photos of Ruoan during the defense and her with three members in her committee (from left to right: Norvin Richards, Adam Albright, Kai von Fintel):
Congratulations, Ruoan!!