Enriching honorific research with honorific phenomena: Insights from Thai interaction
A significant contribution to honorific research emerges from investigations into the complexities of honorific forms, as well as the extensive sociopragmatic characterizations of honorific systems and highly prescribed speech styles/levels, particularly in some East Asian languages (e.g. Korean and Japanese). Seen from this perspective, honorifics in English, German, Italian, Chinese and Thai, for instance, are notably less complex and developed, often confined to lexical categories such as personal pronouns, address forms and titles. The current emphasis on the morpho-syntactic features in honorific research, rooted in twentieth-century structuralism, tends to overlook languages lacking such features. I argue that addressing this imbalance requires a shift in focus from understanding how “linguistic honorifics” operate to how “honorification” is realized, managed and negotiated.
By drawing upon the emic concept of kaːnhâjkiat ‘honorification’, my presentation explores the practice of “doing honorification” among Thai speakers, considering varying degrees of power and distance and in ordinary and institutionalized interactions. Analogous to (negative) politeness realizations, honorification in Thai, in its broadest terms, can be construed as an interactional process whereby a speaker expresses their recognition of someone’s social standing that they consider appropriate following the targeted person’s favourable action and/or identity. This process involves an interplay between conventional and situated honorific forms, with the latter incorporating various practices, including (but not limited to) mentioning the person before others, discussing safe topics, employing certain addressee-oriented paralinguistics and embodiment, remaining silent and even mere verbalization of thought. Interpreting situated honorifics necessitates close consideration of the immediate context and interlocutors’ role relations. This presentation also points to possibilities in which interactants of languages from far and wide implement their linguacultural resources to bestow honorification to others without the use of conventionalized forms, while still achieving interactional goals similar to ones achievable by dint of linguistic honorifics.