This book explores the semantics and pragmatics of honorifics, expressions that indicate the degree of formality that a speaker feels is required in interacting with another person. The analysis is applied to a variety of empirical examples, particularly from Japanese and Thai, and explores a wide range of related philosophical issues.

• 1: Introduction


• 2: Honorification as expressive


• 3: A theory of register for honorification


• 4: Utterance honorifics


• 5: Argument honorifics


• 6: Role honorifics


• 7: Pronouns and honorification


• 8: Honorification as social meaning

Elin McCready is Professor of Linguistics at Aoyama Gakuin University, where she also heads the Singularity Research Institute. Her main area of research is formal semantics and pragmatics, with secondary interests in epistemology, game theory, and feminist philosophy. Her work has been published in journals including Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, Linguistics and Philosophy, and Journal of Pragmatics. She is the author of Reliability in Pragmatics (OUP, 2015) and co-editor of Formal Approaches to Semantics and Pragmatics: Japanese and Beyond (with Katsuhiko Yabushita and Kei Yoshimoto; Springer, 2014) and Epistemology for the Rest of the World (with Stephen Stich and Masaharu Mizumoto; OUP, 2018).