Royal semantics: Linguacultural reflections on the Danish address pronoun De

Anna Wierzbicka’s recent work on the cross-European semantics of address has reopened and invigorated ‘address studies’ (Wierzbicka 2015, 2016a, 2016b, 2016c). This is a remarkable achievement, given that the field of address for a long time has been considered ‘old hat’—a well-studied, almost trivial area of cross-European linguistics, from which very little innovation emerged. For decades, address was popular in both sociolinguistics and pragmatics. Typologies based on the so-called T-V pronouns (such as French tu/vous and German du/Sie) emerged out of sociolinguistic research, and in pragmatics the once flourishing paradigm of ‘politeness theory’ analysed address as a component of