Bystander Honorific
Definition:
A bystander honorific is an honorific in which the social status of some other person present is expressed through choices made among linguistic alternants. These choices:
- are made based upon the person’s relationship to the speaker
-
do not depend on whether
- the alternants refer to the person
- the person is the addressee
Examples:
(Dyirbal, Australia)
Dyirbal has a "mother-in-law language" which is a set of lexical items substituted in the presence of:
- opposite-sex parents-in-law
- opposite-sex children-in-law
- opposite-sex cross-cousins
Source:
This page is an extract from the LinguaLinks Library. Version 5.0 published on CD-ROM by SIL International, 2003.