...
Note that I was referring to the grammaticalisation of first-person pronouns. Lexical items denoting "servant" and "slave" etc can be the source of polite first-person pronouns. But I hardly see how English "your humble servant" is a grammaticalised polite first-person pronoun. The same thing could be happening in the Turkish dialect you mention, but you would need to supply me with further details. ...
... Helmbrecht's implicational hierarchy of the grammaticalisation of politeness distinctions in pronouns would hypothesis that for English "your humble servant" to grammaticalise into a pronoun, a grammaticalised politeness distinction would need to be operable in the second- and third-person. Since this is not the case, "your humble servant" is hypothesised to remain a noun phrase.According to what criteria does Helmbrecht judhe Turkish "bendeniz" to be "grammaticalisation" but, I presume, Hebrew `ABDEKA and English "your humble servant" not to be? If the criterion is that there is also a second or third person politeness distinction, then the argument is circular.
... That English "your humble servant" HASN'T grammaticalised into a first-person pronoun could even be taken in support of my claims. Why hasn't it grammaticalised? The answer from typological research is that English would need polite second- and third-person pronouns before such a grammaticalisation could occur (again, see Helmbrecht's work).
Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.