FORMS OF ADDRESS AS DISCRETE MODAL OPERATORS

The category of expressions of politeness includes, among others, forms of address. Forms of address express honorification. Honorification can be defined as a special type of meaning that consists of information about the social and interpersonal relations between the speaker and the addressee, the speaker and the hearer, and the speaker and the protagonist of the predication. As far as their place in the syntactic structure is concerned, forms of address can either be integrated with the other elements of a predication or not. However, they are always part of a predication’s semantic structure. Moreover, forms of address convey the speaker’s attitude to the meaning of the predicate that they want to convey, which consequently means that forms of address also carry a modal element. Modality can be defined as a situation in which an individual is in a particular mental state, i.e. exhibits some kind of attitude to a situation or a type of situations. Forms of address can be categorised as modal operators conveying imperatives, requests, suppositions, etc. The term “operator” can be used for a unit of language when it changes the semantic structure of the predication. My research on honorification is mainly based on contemporary corpora, both monolingual and multilingual. In the present study, I analyse forms of address which carry imperative and optative meanings.