On honorification in Czech: The Czech polite forms: Theory and corpus data

The author claims that the Czech polite forms (so-called 'vykani') for addressing the 2nd person should be understood as a legitimate part of the Czech conjugation paradigm. If we address a single person in a polite way some Czech analytical verb forms exhibit 'hybrid' agreement (auxiliaries are in plural, while participle form is in singular). However, the paradigm for singular and plural polite forms (addressing a single person, or two or more persons, respectively) is not symmetrical. The question, whether 2nd person plural polite forms are ambiguous (between the polite meaning and 2nd plural non-polite), or whether the semantic distinction 'polite - non-polite' is neutralized in plural, is open for further discussion. Some corpus data illustrating the contexts for the 2nd person polite forms are analyzed here too.

Abstract licence: CC BY-NC-ND

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