Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

The social turn in syntactic theory

Recent work in formal syntax-semantics has developed elaborated frameworks for analyzing social meaning components such as ‘commitment’ or ‘politeness’, also exploring in great detail how the relation between speaker and addressee is instantiated in the morphosyntax across languages. I will present a new approach in this context, which builds on the sociolinguistic concept of the weightiness of a face-threatening act. Based on a discussion of particle elements that occur low in the structure, but nevertheless scope over the whole utterance, I will turn to exceptional uses of 2nd person pronouns. In particular, these new data suggest that there is a position in the left periphery that carries sociolinguistic information only.