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Faculty of Linguistics, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Abstract The study of honorific pronouns largely grew out of work on European languages (Brown and Gilman 1960, Friedrich 1966, Paulston 1976, Slobin 1963,) and has developed into a prodigious, in many ways, fertile literature on so-called ‘address systems’ (e.g., Brown and Ford 1961, Braun 1988). Nevertheless, some 60 years after the publication of Brown and Gilman’s foundational essay, “The pronouns of power and solidarity”, it is perhaps time to imagine how the same discursive phenomena would have been framed differently with a different empirical point of departure. Here we reconceptualize this domain by focusing on the social pragmatics of speaker- and addressee-reference in Southeast Asian, as well as some East Asian, languages. Reimagined from this vantage point, pronominal address emerges as but one half of a more encompassing domain -- the social pragmatics of interlocutor reference. Southeast Asian languages provide speakers with a much wider range of formal resources and functional mechanisms for signaling the relationship between speech act participants (and between them and third parties) than do European languages. Formally, Southeast Asian languages are notable for the range of non-pronominal, open-class nouns which can be employed in speaker- and addressee-reference. Functionally, the social indexing of the relationship between speaker and addressee is not only grammaticalized in forms that are employed to refer to addressee. On the contrary, these languages are notable for elaborating social pragmatic distinctions in speaker-reference as well as addressee-reference. Because Southeast Asian languages recruit a much more expansive range of forms in denoting speech act participants, and because they are not functionally restricted to addressee-reference in activating social pragmatic alternations, they offer the kind of maximally differentiated systems which enable the construction of typological generalizations and implicational universals. Keywords XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX. Corresponding author: Asmah Haji Omar, Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, hajiomarasmah@gmail.com 1. Introduction Benveniste was perhaps one of the first European scholars to note, if only in passing, how significantly patterns of interlocutor reference in Asian languages diverge from those found in European ones. In ‘Subjectivity in Language’, Benveniste (1966 [1958]) argues that the source of human subjectivity is to be found in language and, more specifically, in the act of self-reference by means of grammatically first person pronominals. It is in and through language that man [sic.] constitutes himself as a subject, because language alone establishes the concept of ‘ego’ in reality, in its reality which is that of the being. … ‘Ego’ is he who says ‘ego.’ That is where we see the foundation of ‘subjectivity,’ which is determined by the linguistic status of ‘person.’ (1966 [1958]: 224, n.b., ‘Ego’ means ‘I’ in Latin) This argument combines the Whorfian intuition that grammar conditions the categories of cognition with the Austinian intuition that speech brings social ontologies into being. Soon after introducing the idea that the universal source of subjectivity is deictic self-reference, Benveniste (1966 [1958]: 225-6) adds the following caveat: A language without the expression of person cannot be imagined. It can only happen that in certain languages, under certain circumstances, these ‘pronouns’ are deliberately omitted; this is the case in most of the Far Eastern societies, in which a convention of politeness imposes the use of periphrases or of special forms between certain groups of individuals in order to replace the direct personal references. But these usages only serve to underline the value of the avoided forms; it is the implicit existence of these pronouns that gives social and cultural value to the substitutes imposed by class relationships. For all his brilliance, here, in a sweep of the hand, Benveniste transforms the highly divergent (from a European perspective) patterns of Asian interlocuter reference into simply the exception that proves a universal rule. Though he correctly intuits that politeness and pronominality are complexly interwoven in Asian languages, in his formulation, social pragmatics simply reduces to a distinction between lexical categories: “true” pronouns are impolite while the use of non-pronominal “special forms” is polite. If we follow Benveniste’s own very well-reasoned definition of “true” pronominality we can see that such a dichotomy is unduly reductive and simply wrong. For Benveniste, “true” pronouns involve a necessarily reflexive relationship between the reference of tokens of a form type and participant role occupancy in the event of speaking within which the token occurs. So, for instance, a given token of “I” refers to the speech act participant who utters it. He writes: Each instance of use of a noun is referred to a fixed and ‘objective’ notion, capable of remaining potential or of being actualized in a particular object and always identical with the mental image it awakens. But the instances of the use of I do not constitute a class of reference since there is no ‘object’ definable as I to which these instances can refer in identical fashion. Each I has its own reference and corresponds each time to a unique being who is set up as such. (Benveniste 1966 [1956]: 218) And later: What then is the reality to which I or you refers? It is solely a ‘reality of discourse,’ and this is a very strange thing. I cannot be defined except in terms of ‘locution,’ not in terms of objects as a nominal sign is. I signifies ‘the person who is uttering the present instance of the discourse containing I.’ This instance is unique by definition and has validity only in its uniqueness. (…) I can only be identified by the instance of discourse that contains it and by that alone. (ibid.) The 1st and 2nd persons, but not the 3rd conform to this definition – making the 3rd person for Benveniste the ‘unmarked’ nonperson category. For our purposes, narrowing the terminology innovated by Agha (2007), we will characterize form types which denote either speaker or addressee, and thus whose tokens indexically refer to the occupants of those speech participant roles, as deictically selective. Nouns that refer to speech act participants in this manner we will simply call pronouns, regardless whether there is morphosyntactic agreement or cross-referencing of person features in the language in question. Benveniste’s treatment is empirically wrong for the simple reason that deictically selective terms in Southeast Asian languages are not universally judged as less polite than deictically non-selective ones. Deictically nonselective terms, like personal names, are often judged as highly impolite in addressee-reference (e.g. in addressing ascending generation lineal kin in Javanese, Karo, Thai, Chinese, Kachin, Karen [see Fleming & Slotta 2018 for citations]). Meanwhile, deictically selective terms grammaticalized from honorific nouns are often synchronically conceptualized as respectful. Honorific speaker- and addressee-referring terms grammaticalized from words meaning ‘servant/slave’ and ‘master/king’, respectively - are found in numerous Southeast languages, like Achenese, Burmese, Khmer, Malay, Thai, Lao and Vietnamese (Ishiyama 2010:23-24). However, although politeness does not reduce to the avoidance of pronouns, Benveniste nevertheless correctly intuited that pronominality and politeness are caught up with one another in important ways in the languages of East and Southeast Asia. There is evidence that speakers’ tend to view noun phrase types which refer only by virtue of role inhabitancy as less polite than noun phrase types which pick out interlocutors configurationally, by making allusion to value social networks of relations. Benveniste’s mistake was to telescope the relationship between referential and nonreferential indexical functions. That is, he saw a particular indexical architecture of reference, person deixis, as directly encoding the nonreferential indexical function of impoliteness. By thus identifying the semiotic means of achieving interlocutor reference (i.e. deictically selective versus non-selective noun phrase types) and the social pragmatic significances of those distinct ways of making reference (i.e. impoliteness and politeness, respectively), he sidestepped the question of the ways in which ideologies of interlocutor reference mediate the social meanings of alternant ways of referring to speech participants in East and Southeast Asian language communities. That said, we contend, that much of the texture of interlocutor reference as social practice in Asian speech communities relies precisely upon speakers’ own reflexive and ideological engagements with what choice of person referring expression says about the social relationship(s) between self and other(s). Our goal here will be to sketch out a framework for understanding the unique richness of interlocutor reference in the languages of East and Southeast Asia. In doing this we follow, in broad strokes, the model of Michael Silverstein (1985:513) for whom “[t]he total linguistic fact” is understood as determined in the interrelationships between “language structure, contextualized usage, and ideologies of language.” We look at the language structural features that have enabled the diachronic development of elaborate repertoires of non-deictic interlocutor referring forms, we draw on Vietnamese data to foreground discursive practices of interlocutor reference employing OCIR terms, and we suggest how these practices are seen as diagrammatic of (or iconically-indexical of) ideologies of valued social interdependency. This work will allow us to create a framework within which interlocuter reference appears as an intuitive domain of empirical inquiry for a form-functionally grounded social pragmatics of language. The unique attributes of speech participant reference in Asian languages have not only attracted the attention of Émile Benveniste. Semanticists and syntacticians, in particular, have increasingly been concerned with patterns interlocuter reference in Southeast and East Asian languages. Much of this literature is focally concerned with the question of whether referring expressions truly count as pronouns or not as judged on various theoretical and analytic criteria (see the literature on ‘pronominal imposters’ e.g. Collins 2014, Kaufman 2014, see also, Pham 2011). The particularities of the semantic and syntactic properties of interlocuter referring expressions in Asian languages have tended to occlude discussion of their non-referential and socially pragmatic properties. We suspect that the semantic and syntactic lines of research into grammatical person in Asian languages will be nourished by a deeper understanding of the social pragmatics of interlocutor reference. There are good reasons to believe that it will. As we now argue, speakers’ reflexive and ideological valuations of different kinds of acts of interlocutor reference engages with the language structural organization of deictic selectivity, channelling the historical development of the very patterns that are so interesting to syntacticians and semanticists. Gaining analytic purchase upon the semantics and syntax of grammatical person in Asian languages will thus require a deeper understanding of the social pragmatics of interlocuter reference. 2. Open-class interlocuter reference [OCIR] in Southeast Asia The languages of Southeast Asia belong to at least five language families and though many of them share important typological characteristics, the region is still a hotbed of linguistic diversity. Nevertheless, many languages from the Austronesian, Austroasiatic, Tai-Kradai, and Sino-Tibetan families exhibit some remarkable commonalities in the patterning of interlocuter reference. In most languages exhibiting social pragmatic alternations in interlocuter reference, speakers employ one of a tightly circumscribed set of pronominal alternants to refer to self or interactional alter. In French, for instance, speaker reference alternates between je (1s), nous (1p), and on while addressee reference is limited to tu (2s) and vous (2p). In languages of Southeast Asia, contrastingly, a wide range of both pronominal and non-pronominal nouns, including titles, names, and most prominently, kin terms can all be felicitously employed in referring to both speaker and addressee. This use of deictically non-selective nouns in both speaker and addressee reference is essentially only attested in East and Southeast Asian languages. Looking beyond Southeast Asia, languages differ in the range of non-deictically selective nouns which are ubiquitously employed in interlocuter reference. The use of nouns in addressee-reference in argument position has a more widespread distribution. For Europe, Portuguese is often cited as a language of this sort, though OCIR is restricted to two nouns – a senhora [Madam] and o senhor [Sir] (Head 1976). Though the use of nouns in argument-position, addressee-reference is quite rare in European languages, it is much more common in the languages of South Asia. In Malayalam (Chandrasekhar 1970, 1977) and Sinhala, for instance, a wide range of noun can be employed in addressee-reference. As Table 1 illustrates, it is the use of nouns in speaker-reference which is the most marked formal means for achieving the function of interlocutor reference cross-linguistically. Though nouns may be used in speaker-reference, they often carry negative connotations outside of the SE Asian region. In English, for instance, the use of personal names for interlocuter reference is largely restricted to vocative address (i.e. non-argument position). In argument position, names are occasionally used in speaker-reference -- but such illeism is widely seen as self-aggrandizing and arrogant (e.g. Barford 2015). To summarize, a characteristic feature of Southeast Asian languages is a much more widespread use of open-class nouns in both addressee- and speaker-reference. We will call this ‘open-class interlocuter reference’, or OCIR, for short. 3. The Malay Language The centrality of Malay is not confined to its position as the common language medium in the primary domains in the life of Malaysians, as in governance and education, as well as in inter-ethnic communication. It has been the only lingua franca among peoples of the Southeast Asian islands, and the medium used by these peoples with foreigners. Malay is now the national and official language of three nations, namely Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brunei Darussalam. This means that there are three national varieties, and each of these supra-varieties has its own local dialects. From centuries past, Malay has been about the only native language of the three countries mentioned above that has received a great deal of attention from scholars both within and outside the region, who have conducted research on various aspects of its systems and structures. Research on the language includes the reconstruction of older linguistic forms, giving explanation of linguistic change, and from there to the spread of the language in mainland Asia and the islands of Southeast Asia, and beyond. The history of Malay as a written language began in the seventh century as evidenced by four stone inscriptions found in Southern Sumatera and the Bangka Island, which are now territories of Indonesia. These are texts written in the Pallava script of Southern India, using the high variety Malay of the period, narrating the success story of the ruler in his conquest of territories and in the spread of Buddhism (Omar, 2013: Chapter 3; G. Coedes 2009). These stone inscriptions appear to be the only evidence of the use of the Pallava scriptin writing the Malay language. It was Islam that came three centuries later that gave the Malays a permanent writing system in the form of the Arabic script which they have indigenized with the addition of new symbols to suit the phonological system of the language. In doing so, the early Malays gave an indigenous label to the script, the Jawi script. With this script the Malays were able to record their traditions in various genres, including those of the pre-Islamic ones. When the Western powers came to the Malay world beginning with the Portuguese in 1511, followed by the Dutch in 1640, and then the British in 1786, another writing system was introduced for the writing of the Malay language. This is the Roman alphabet, known among Malaysians as the Rumi script, Rumi being a Malayized form of Rome from where the script originated. But this writing system did not gain much popularity with the Malays who preferred the Jawi writing. It was only when Malaya became independent from British rule in 1957 that the Rumi script was elevated to become the main writing system for Malay. This policy was undertaken for the purpose of modernization, as the Rumi script was closer to the world of knowledge, and to achievement in the fields of technology and the sciences. The Jawi script which previously had given valuable service to the Malays in the recording of their rich literary traditionsin the form of prose and poetry has been given second place in importance, and it is now mainly used in the teaching of Islam. What this means is that Malay texts before the second half of the 20th century are mostly in the Jawi script, while those printed after the period are almost all in the Jawi system of writing. Malay lexicography has its beginning in the 15th century, with the arrival of traders and religious missionaries from outside the Malay world. The earliest known glossary is a Chinese-Malay word list, estimated to be of the date 1403-1511 C. E.3 (Blagden & Edwards, 1930-1932). This was followed by an Italian-Malay word list, better known as the Pigafetta word list,as it was collected by Pigafetta, the Italian seaman who visited the Malay Archipelago in the early part of the 16th century (Pigafetta undated). There were many more word lists that emerged later on, mostly collected by travelers from the West, represented by the Dutch, the French, the Germans, and the English. It can be said that interest from the outside world in the Malay Archipelago for various objectives such as trade, spread of Christianity, and colonization had generated a fertile growth of Malay lexicography which evolved from bilingual word lists to bilingual dictionaries. As shown by the Malay example, and most probably by a majority of languages of the world, dictionaries have their beginning as bilingual glossaries, illustrating the need of outsiders to know the language of a community other than their own. The monolingual dictionary for Malay made its debut only in the last decade of the 19th century. Pigafetta’s Italian-Malay word list seems to be the earliest evidence of the writing of Malay using the Rumi script. The graphemic renderings of Malay words in the list appear to be based on Pigafetta’s perception of the Malay words he heard in his interaction with Malay-speaking peoples in the ports of the islands of the Malay Archipelago (Bausani, 1961). Similarly early dictionaries produced by Westerners as mentioned above give the spelling of Malay words according to the perception of the collector/compiler and is very much influenced by his native language. Arising from this practice, words in the Malay language were spelt in the Rumi script in many different ways. It was only in 1904 that a standard spelling system was formulated and implemented for use in the schools in Malaya and Singapore. This spelling is known as the Wilkinson spelling system, after the Chairman of the Spelling Committee, J. R. Wilkinson, who at that time was also the Director of Education of the 3 The year 1403 C.E. was the year the first merchant fleet from China arrived in the Malay kingdom of Melaka, with the Muslim Admiral Cheng Ho as head of delegation. The first settlement of Chinese on Malay land took place circa the early part of the 15th century in Bukit Cina (Chinese Hill) in Melaka. Federated Malay States and the Straits Settlements of Penang, Melaka and Singapore. Another spelling reform took place in the 1924 with minor changes to the Wilkinson system, to suit Malay phonology. The person responsible for these changes was a Malay language specialist in the Department of Education, by the name of Zainal Abidin bin Ahmad, better known by his pen-name Za’ba. This amended system came to be known as the Za’ba system as well as the school system, as it was used in the schools (Omar, 2008: p. 90; Nawang, 2005: p. 126). With the implementation of the New Education Policy of 1970 which stresses the importance of Malay as the main medium of education from the primary to the tertiary level, there was a need to spell the language in such way that it should be able to take inneologisms in the form of academic and scientific terminologies which are sourced through English. There had to be a way of transferring them into the Malay language without much loss of their original spelling in the English language, but at the same time giving them a Malay phonological identity. As the national language of Indonesia, known as bahasa Indonesia, is basically the same language as that of Malaysia, and plus the fact that Indonesia also shared the same mission as Malaysia in wanting to elevate her national language to be a significant medium in the expression of scientific matters, a co-operation between the two countries was established to achieve this mission. The first product of this language cooperation was a common spelling system which was officially declared in 1972 as the official spelling for both countries. It is this system that is in use until today for the writing of Malay, not just in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brunei Da russalam, but wherever Malay or bahasa Indonesia is used or taught (A full story of this language co-operation is given in Omar, 1979). The presence and utilization of this common spelling system in the long history of writing Malay in the Rumi script, has given stability in the production of texts of all kinds. The following four properties have paved the way for Malay to undergo NLP: 1. Written texts in great quantity in various genres. 2. A standard spelling system in the Rumi script which makes it easier for computer-assisted processing compared to the Jawi script. 3. Full descriptions of its phonology and grammar. 4. Dictionaries in the monolingual and bilingual modes. However, NLP of Malay has not really taken off on a significant scale. There are Ph.D. theses, though few, written by Malaysian students for the degree in local and foreign universities, and these are based on data from specific corpora. The Dewan Bahasa danPustaka, or DBP (which in English is known as Institute of Language and Literature), was set up by the government in 1956 on the eve of the Malayan independence, with the responsibility of developing and promoting the Malay language as national and official language as well as the main language of education. One of the tasks of this institute is to produce dictionaries for Malay. It has done so for both the monolingual and the bilingual types. Its monolingual dictionary the Kamus Dewan, which has now reached its fifth edition, is the foremost authoritative reference in Malay lexicography. Likewise are the DBP’s bilingual Malay-English (Kamus Melayu—Inggeris Dewan), and English-Malay (Kamus Inggeris—Melayu Dewan) dictionaries. All these dictionaries were first compiled in the days when Malaysia was not yet acquainted with NLP (Omar, 2008). The DBP has since built a data base for Malay, to be used for various purposes in the promotion of the Malay language. Uppermost in its list of objectives is the compilation of what I would call a “mother dictionary”, which will be the source or the referent point in the compiling of other dictionaries for Malay. MIMOS (Malaysian Institution of Microelectronic Systems) which was established in 1985, and placed under the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, has also started to include NLP in its programme of activities. 4. Other Indigenous Languages: State of the Art Of indigenous languages other than Malay, the only two languages that can be said to be ready for NLP are Iban of Sarawak, and Kadazandusun of Sabah. They have the properties (i)-(iv) which have been ascribed to Malay, though not in terms of quantity. The compendium of written corpora in each of these two languages is still thin compared to Malay. Both these languages were first given a writing system, in the Rumi script in the late 19th century, for the purpose of translating religious texts from the Bible, from the English source. The translation was done by English-speaking Christian missionaries with the help of native speakers. Christian mission schools were set up in the villages where most of these ethnic groups were domiciled (Banker, 1984, Department of Education Sarawak 1984, KCA Sabah, 1989). Up to this point in time, these two languages were still languages of memory, a term first used by Swaan4, i.e. languages which had not been given a written form. The production of non-religious texts came much later, with the establishment of the Borneo Literature Bureau (BLB) by the British colonial government in 1952. The main activity of the BLB was collecting and publishing folk traditions of the ethnic groups of Sabah and Sarawak. All these traditions had hardly been put in writing prior to that date. Probably because the office of the BLB was in Kuching, Sarawak, the bulk of folk traditions in the form of folk tales, native belief systems, customs, traditions etc. published by BLB were those of the Iban (formerly known as Sea Dayak) people. Publications of folk traditions of other groups in Sarawak and in Sabah were too few for mention, including those of the Kadazan and Dusun people of the latter state. As mentioned earlier in this paper, the rendering of texts of folk traditions in the native languages were done according to individual perceptions of the speech sounds of the narrators, which were then transcribed into the Rumi script. There was no standard form of spelling for the language of the texts collected. And this was in tandem with a situation where a standard form of speech was non-existent. For example, Iban texts published by the BLB between 1952 and 19775 are spelt in many different ways. To a field linguist, like myself, variations in the spelling of words may represent a variety of dialects. Even though the transcription may not be accurate, this was a starting point for the field linguist to probe into the various dialectal variations. But at the same time I could see from these Iban publications some semblance of a uniformity in the spelling of words in texts which were collected by speakers originating from one and the same region. For example, texts collected by Iban speakers from the Second Division of Sarawak appear to be similar in the spelling of Iban words, and these may differ from those compiled in the Third Division by dialect speakers of this region. It was when Iban became an important mother tongue6 subject in the national schools in Sarawakin 1987 that efforts were undertaken to formulate a single standard spelling system for use in the schools, as well as in the publishing of Iban books, newsletters, and pamphlets (Department of Education Sarawak, 1964; Dayak Cultural Foundation, 1995; Bahagian Pembangunan Kurikulum, 2007). Kadazandusun of Sabahbecame a mother tongue subject taught in national schools in the state in 1997, ten years after Iban. Like Iban, there were already texts written in the Kadazandusun language, but in the early days of its appearance in the Rumi script the spelling was the result of the perception of the writers/collectors of folk traditions. In the 1990s, knowing that the chance to have their language taught in the national school, educators and leaders in the Kadazandusun community were already preparing for the admission of their language into the national school system, and the first task undertaken was formulating a standard spelling system. This activity went hand in hand with the writing of texts for teaching in the schools (KCA Sabah, 1989; Lasimbang, 1998). Having a standard orthography for a language means that there is already a phonological description of this language, and this was the case of both Iban and Kadazandusun. The descriptions rendered for these two languages may not be comprehensive for a linguist. However, the identification of phonemes and their variations should be sufficient to decide on corresponding graphemes, using the symbols of the Rumi script. In the transferring of oral texts to writing, there is another requirement, and that is the identification of language units at higher levels above the phoneme. These are the morpheme, the word, and the sentence. This task, as it were, has to a certain extent been accomplished for both Iban and Kadazandusun (see Omar, 2013; Omar & Sandai, 2012a, 2012b; Lasimbang, 1994, 1998). Dictionaries are a help in NLP. Of all these other indigenous languages, Iban appears to have more than any other, even compared to Kadazandusun (Lasimbang, 1994). These are mostly bilingual Iban-English dictionaries (Richards, 1981; Sutlive & Sutlive, 1994). So far there is only one Iban-Malay dictionary, and an Iban monolingual dictionary (Tun Jugah Foundation, 2011). As for indigenous languages other than Iban and Kadazandusun, most of them are still a long way away in the production of corpora for NLP. This means they do not have all of the properties (i)-(iv) posited above. The great majority of them are still languages of memory, in terms of phonological and grammatical descriptions, while some others have been given basic descriptions sufficient to write down oral texts. Even if some basic descriptions do exist, there is a lack of written corpora. An example is the Mah Meri language, an Austroasiatic language spoken in Sepang, a district not far from the Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Peninsular Malaysia. There is already a sufficiently comprehensive description of the phonology and grammar, and also a sufficiently comprehensive glossary in trilingual mode of Mah Meri-Malay-English consisting of lexical items of Mah Meri life, traditions and environment (see Omar (Ed.), 2014). However, there is hardly any text written in the language. For the fieldworker to get lists of vocabulary of a language unknown to him is not a difficult task, as there are various techniques in eliciting words of different domains. The same goes with eliciting types of sentences. However, to have a written corpus in these languages, one has to source from their traditions. In other words, the researcher has to get the informants to tell their stories. From my own experience in the field among the “small language” communities in Sabah and Sarawak, as well among the Orang Asli in Peninsular Malaysia, it has not been smooth going in getting informants to tell stories in their own language. I had no problem with the Iban in the longhouses upstream in my early days on doing research on their language, although at that time I was just learning to pick up their speech system through staying with them in their longhouse. With informants of most of these so-called small languages, they prefer to tell their stories in the lingua franca they share with the researcher, that is Malay, or specifically the Malay dialect used by their community members when speaking with people of other ethnic groups. Most of the time they would say that they have no story to tell, or that they have forgotten all those tales of their ancestors (Omar, 2014a; Jan et al., 2014). I attribute this reluctance of theirs to a misapprehension they have of their language, thinking that it is an inferior speech system compared to others, and associated with this is a pretension of memory loss. This misapprehension is brought about by the presence of a powerful lingua franca, Malay, which is also the national language. To illustrate, when my team of researchers and I were working on the MahMeri language in 2001 through to 2002, the informants, men and women, were reluctant to provide a lengthy discourse on any topic using their language. But they were ready to do it in Malay, and we managed to have a collection of their verse forms, songs, folktales, and incantations in the medium of the Malay language. After months of establishing an acquaintance with them, we managed to coax their chieftain (TokBatin) to relate to us the well-known story of Si Tenggang, a son who dismissed his mother as a poor village woman when he took home a princess from abroad for his bride. For this unbecoming behavior, he received aretribution from the power up above in which he, his bride and retinue, and the whole ship which took him home, was turned into stone. This metamorphosis in the form of a limestone hill is supposed to be the Batu Caves (meaning “caves of stones”) in Kuala Lumpur, which has become a popular tourist attraction. However in certain parts of Sarawak, to my knowledge, Malay or a local dialect of Malay is not the only lingua franca. There is an equally powerful one, and that is Iban. My own survey of the Bintulu area in 2005 showed that Iban was much more spoken in the market places and in the town area compared to Malay. There was a Tatau longhouse not far upriver from the Bintulu town area, occupied by members of two different languages which were in the endangered list, the Tatau language having only 75 speakers, and Lugat with 30. The traditional ceremony welcoming me was conducted in Iban, which fortunately I could understand. When I asked them to tell me in their own language how they came to be settled in that longhouse, so that I could record their story in their native tongue, the story came out in Iban with Malay code-switching (Omar & Ghazali, 2014). A study on language choice in the multiethnic and multilingual district of Sarikei in Sarawak by Mohammed Azlan Mis shows that while each of the four ethnic groups of Malays, Iban, Melanau and Chinese choose their own language in the home domain, the favorite speech systems in intergroup communication are Sarawak Malay and Iban. Due to the habit of using these two languages in such a situation, there has emerged a mixed code of Sarawak Malay and Iban (Mohammed Azlan Mis, 2011). We could take another approach in our acquisition of corpora in an indigenous language by having the native speakers themselves to collect them from members of their own community, in the same way the BLB used community members to record their community’s stories using the medium of their own language. With the Mah Merimy team and I couldn’t find native speakers to co-operate in carrying out this task, let alone the youths who were literate as they were busy joining the rat race in a competitive world. Most of the time they couldn’t understand why we were interested in their language. With today’s technology one can still conduct NLP using recorded speech of a particular language. But without a written corpus to fall back on, and plus the fact that there does not exist a description of its phonology and grammar, this may prove to be a very difficult task even with the assistance of a native speaker who is no doubt an excellent speaker in the language. Being a good speaker is not the same as being able to answer the linguist’s question when it comes to the tagging of grammatical unit, or the parsing of short stretches of speech into component units. The linguist will still have to carry out this task on his own. All this goes to show that the description of the phonology and grammar is basic to the processing of these indigenous languages. Phonology provides the basis for the identification of grammatical units, as well as to the formulation of a spelling system. 5. Typology of Malaysian Indigenous Languages In the introduction to this paper I have mentioned that Malaysian indigenous languages belong to two entirely different families. The implication is that each family is characterized by its own typology. Identifying the typology of a language at any level is useful for NLP. For this, one can start with the premise that the typology of any particular language within a single family is a reflection of the typology of other members within the same family. On this premise, and with evidence from analyses that have so far been conducted on languages of both the Austronesian and the Austroasiatic families of Malaysia, one can get a general picture of the typologies of these two families. As those who have worked on language typology know, when we say that a language with typology X at the phonological or morphological level, it means that the general picture given by this language is that of type X at this level of analysis. At the same time it does not mean that this language does not have type Y as its phonological or morphological characteristic; only that type Y is not significant in terms of number and frequency compared to X. Discussion on the typology of the languages below is given according to the levels of language analysis: phonological and grammatical. Only the types which are indigenous are taken into account in this typology. 6. Typology of phonological Units At the level of the phonology, there appears to be a great deal of similarity in the types of phonological units between the two languages, as given in Table 1. An obvious difference between the two families of languages is in the syllable structure, where the Austroasiatic languages admit consonant clusters, up to three consonants, as onsets of the syllable; hence, the indigenous syllable structure of this group can be written as (C)(C)(C)V(C). On the other hand, the indigenous syllable structure of the Austronesian languages is (C)V(C), an indication that consonant clusters do not feature as on sets of syllables. If they do, there are two possibilities that may explain the existence of this feature. One is due to an internal phonological change, showing the contraction of the first syllable of a disyllabic word to a cluster, resulting in a monosyllabic word. The formula for this type of change is as follows: Syllable 1 - Syllable 2 #VN- XY# V represents any vowel N any nasal consonant X any non-nasal consonant homorganic with N Y any element(s) occurring after Y # - silence before and after the word Deletion occurs on the V of the first syllable, as given below, causing a reduction of a two-syllable word to become a monosyllabic one, and the latter takes a homorganic nasal-oral cluster as onset: #VN - XY#—>• #NXY# Examples: anjap —>• njap (Malay: third uncle or aunt) anda?—> nda? (Malay: fourth uncle or aunt) anti —► nti (Iban: if) onday —► nday (Iban: no, not) Table 1. Types of phonological units. Phonological Units Austronesian Languages Austroasiatic Languages Vowel Inventory Between 6 and 8 All cardinal vowels Between 6 and 8 All cardinal vowels Consonant Inventory Between 16 and 19 With phonemic and prosodic ? and h Between 16 and 19 With phonemic and prosodic ? and h Syllable Structure (C) V (C) (C) (C) (C) V (C) Word Structure Disyllabic Disyllabic The second explanation as to the occurrence of consonant clusters as syllable onsets in Austronesian languages may be seen in the many neologisms from English that have entered the Malay language. Even with some change in their graphemic representations, these neologisms still retain the clusters. Examples are words such as proses (process), klinik (clinic), planet (planet), struktur (structure), psikologi psychology), etc. This particular phonological feature has been accepted as part of the phonological structure of Malay. Slowly they are making their entrance into Iban and Kadazan with the transfer of the more general items in the vocabulary from Malay, such as proses, projek, and klinik. Clusters in the Austronesian languages are mostly of the type nasal-oral on condition these two elements are homorganic. And the position of this type of cluster is intersyllabic, i.e. with a juncture between them, with the nasal ending the first syllable, and the oral homorganic consonant beginning the second syllable. Hence, in syllable division one can place a hyphen between the two. A cluster of this type is known as abutting cluster, a term first popularized by Abercrombie (1967). Examples: Malay /kampop/: /kam-pop/ (village) /nanti/ : /nan-ti/ (wait) /gapgu/ : /gap-gu/ (disturb) Iban/kampop/: /kam-pop/ (forest) /dindip/ : /din-dip/ (wall, partition) TambunanDusun /lintun/ : /lin-tun/ (descend) /nopgo/: /nop-go/ (where) As seen from the examples given above, abutting clusters occur in the word-medial position whereas the non-abutting ones are as onsets of syllables. In terms of indigenous feature, no consonant cluster occurs in the word-final position. With the development of Malay as a medium in teaching the sciences and technology in schools and universities comes the acceptance of English terms with word-final consonant clusters, such as kompleks (complex), eksport (export), kloroform (chloroform), etc. 7. Typology of Grammatical Units A comparison of the typologies of grammatical units of both families of languages under comparison is given in Table 2. Main differences between the Austronesian and the Austroasiatic families can be located at four main levels: morphology, word, phrase and clause. At the level of morphology, word- forms appear to be more complex in the former compared to the latter. Complexity in the latter is seen only in the presence of reduplication, but this morphological type is that of full reduplication. In the Austronesian languages, there are three types of reduplication: (i) of the first syllable of the root word; (ii) of the root of the complex word; (iii) of the whole word. The higher complexity of word-forms in the Austronesian group is also seen in the use of affixes. Of all the three types of affixes given in Table 2, the one that is most dominant is the prefix, that is to say prefixes occur in all the languages in the group, some tending to have more of this type of affix than others. For example, Malay has a total of 30 single unit affixes, consisting of 16 prefixes, five infixes, three suffixes, and six split affixes (Omar, 2014b). On the other hand, Iban has 12 affixes, 11 of which are prefixes, and the other a suffix (Omar, 2013). Tambunan Dusun, spoken in Sabah and which has not been given a written tradition, has20 verbal affixes, 16 of which are prefixes (Omar, 1983: pp. 214-243). Table 2. Types of grammatical units. Grammatical Units Austronesian Languages Austroasiatic Languages (i) Agglutinative: affixes(prefix, infix, suffix) Isolative Morphology Reduplication: first syllable of root word, root of complex word, whole word Reduplication: whole word Word Full words Particles Full words Phrase Head-Modifier (H-M) Prepositional Head-Modifier (H-M) Clause Independent Dependent Independent Sentence Subject-Verb- Object (SVO) Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) Complex Sentence Paratactic—with & without conjunctions Hypotactic—with conjunctions Paratactic—without conjunctions What is meant by a single unit affix is an affix which consists of a single bound morpheme. In the Austronesian languages these single unit affixes are prefixes, infixes, suffixes, and split affixes. In Table 3 below, data from three languages are given as a comparison in the division of these affixes into their different types. As will be seen, there is clear evidence that Austronesian languages are typologically prefixal. Table 3 does not include complex affixation where the lexico-grammatical derivation of certain categories of words requires the use of two or three affixes. This type of agglutinative complexity is more prevalent in Malay than in any of the other languages. As shown in Table 2, another point of divergence between the two groups of languages under comparison isthe grammatical type(s) of words each has. The Austronesian languages have both the full words and the particles, whereas the Austroasiatic languages only have the former type. If particles appear in the latter, they are transfers from a language of the Austronesian family, and this other language is usually Malay (see Omar (Ed.), 2014, all chapters on word classes and phrases). Particles comprise prepositions and conjunctions. Due to the absence of these two grammatical subcategories, the Austroasiatic languages do not have prepositional phrases which in the Austronesian languages function as adverbial phrases of place, time, direction, comparison etc. Concepts borne by such phrases in the Austroasiatic languages are conveyed by full words. Similarly, the absence of conjunctions in Austroasiatic languages also means that these languages do not have dependent (or subordinate) clauses. This in turn leads to them not having complex sentences of the hypotactic type. In the Austronesian languages hypotactic complex sentences are marked by the presence of subordinating conjunctions. As for the paratactic type of complex sentence, in the Austronesian languages these are formed by combining an independent clause with at least one other independent clause, with or without a coordinating conjunction. When no such conjunction is used, the paratactic relationship between the clauses can be identified in the intonation contour which pitches down at the end of the preceding clause before the one following it is uttered. In written language, this is realized in the use of the graphic symbol, the coma (,). Paratactic complex sentences in the Austroasiatic group are of the same type as the Austronesian paratactic sentences which do not make use of a conjunction As for the typology of the simple sentences, both groups of languages are of the SVO type. In conversation and story-telling another structure appears to be as significant, and this is the Theme-Rheme (or Topic-Comment) structure. Written Iban tends to use more and more of the SVO type of structure, whereas Iban texts collected by the BLB in 1950s and 1960s show a greater usage of the Theme-Rheme structure. The tendency towards SVO is due to the influence of Malay which is the national and official language, and the learning of this language in the school. Table 3. A Comparison of affixes in Malay, Iban, Dusun Tambunan. Affixes Malay Iban T ambunan Dusun Prefix 16 (6 verb, 4 noun, 3 numeral, 3 adjective) 11 (7 verb, 2 noun, 1 adjective, 1 numeral) 17 (15 verb, 1 noun, 1 adjective) infix 5(4 noun, 1 adjective) - 4(verb) Suffix 3(2 verb, 1 noun) 1 (verb) 1 (noun) Split Affix 6(2 verb, 3 noun, 1 numeral) - 4 (3 noun, 1 verb) Total 30 12 26 8. Conclusion A natural language has to have the four properties specified in this paper for it to be suited for NLP. Among the many Malaysian indigenous languages, only Malay, Iban and Kadazanduusun can be considered suited for this type of processing. It has also been shown in this paper that descriptions of phonology and grammar, as well as a sufficient amount of corpora are needed for this method of language analysis. Most of the Malaysian indigenous languages still have a long way to go before NLP can be applied on them. References Banker, J. E. (1984). The Kadazan/Dusun Language. In J. W. King, & J. K. King (Eds.), Languages of Sabah: A Survey Re port (pp. 297-324). Canberra: The Australian National University. Blagden, C. O., & Edwards, E. D. (1930-1932). A Chinese Vocabulary of Malacca Malay Words and Phrases Collected between A.D. 1403 and 1511 (?). Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 6, 363-397. Dayak Cultural Foundation (1995). Atur Sepil Jaku Iban (The Spelling System of Iban). Kuching: Dayak Cultural Foundation. de Saussure, F. (1960). Course in General Linguistics. London: Peter Owen Limited. de Swaan, A. (2001). Words of the World: The Global Language System. Cambridge: Polity Press. de Swaan, A. (2003). Asia’s Affairs with English, Hindi, Filipino and Malay. In A. H. Omar (Ed.), The Genius of Malay Civilisation (pp. 365-411). Tanjong Malim: Institute of Malay Civilisation, Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris. Department of Education Sarawak (1964). The Full Teaching Syllabus for Junior Secondary Schools. Kuching: Department of Education Sarawak. Jan, J. M., Zaid, A. R. M., & Shamsudin, K. (2014). Antologi Cerita, Pantun, Lagu, dan Jampi Bahasa Mah Meri. Jurnal Bahasa Jendela Alam, 8, 9-61. KCA Sabah (1989). KOISAAN Language Symposium: Towards Standardisation of the Kadazan Dialects. Souvenir Book. Kundasang, 13-15 January 1989. Kurikulum, B. P. (2007). Sistem Jaku Iban di Sekula (Iban Speech Systems for Schools). Kuala Lumpur: Ministry of Education Malaysia. Lasimbang, R. (1994). Kadazan Dusun—Malay—English Dictionary. Proceedings of the Third Biennial International Conference of the Borneo Research Council, Pontianak, 10-14 July 1994. Lasimbang, R. (1998). Kadazandusun Mother Tongue Education. In K. K. Soong (Ed.), Mother Tongue Education of Malaysia Ethnic Minorities (pp. 96-99). 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Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa danPustaka. Omar, A. H. (2014a). Analysis of Folktales, Verse Forms and Incantations of the MahMeri. Jurnal Bahasa Jendela Alam, 8, 1-8. Omar, A. H. (2014b). Nahu Melayu Mutakhir. Edisi Kelima. Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa danPustaka. Omar, A. H. (Ed.) (2014). The Mah Meri Language: An Introduction. Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press. Omar, A. H., & Ghazali, K. (Ed.) (2014). Indigenous Minorities of Bintulu: A Sociolinguistic Mapping. In A. H. Omar, & N. Norahim (Eds.), Linguistic Minorities: Their Existence and Identity within Larger Communities (Chapter 6). Kuching: Universiti Malaysia Sarawak. Omar, A. H., & Sandai, R. (2012a). Fonologi Bahasa Iban: Fonologi Jaku Iban. Tanjung Malim: Penerbit Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris. Omar, A. H., & Sandai, R. (2012b). Morfologi Bahasa Iban: Morfologi Jaku Iban. Tanjung Malim: Penerbit Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris. Richards, A. (1981). An Iban-English Dictionary. London: Oxford University Press. 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The typology and social pragmatics of interlocutor reference in Southeast Asia Luke Fleming & Jack Sidnell Abstract The study of honorific pronouns largely grew out of work on European languages (Brown and Gilman 1960, Friedrich 1966, Paulston 1976, Slobin 1963,) and has developed into a prodigious, in many ways, fertile literature on so-called ‘address systems’ (e.g., Brown and Ford 1961, Braun 1988). Nevertheless, some 60 years after the publication of Brown and Gilman’s foundational essay, “The pronouns of power and solidarity”, it is perhaps time to imagine how the same discursive phenomena would have been framed differently with a different empirical point of departure. Here we reconceptualize this domain by focusing on the social pragmatics of speaker- and addressee-reference in Southeast Asian, as well as some East Asian, languages. Reimagined from this vantage point, pronominal address emerges as but one half of a more encompassing domain -- the social pragmatics of interlocutor reference. Southeast Asian languages provide speakers with a much wider range of formal resources and functional mechanisms for signaling the relationship between speech act participants (and between them and third parties) than do European languages. Formally, Southeast Asian languages are notable for the range of non-pronominal, open-class nouns which can be employed in speaker- and addressee-reference. Functionally, the social indexing of the relationship between speaker and addressee is not only grammaticalized in forms that are employed to refer to addressee. On the contrary, these languages are notable for elaborating social pragmatic distinctions in speaker-reference as well as addressee-reference. Because Southeast Asian languages recruit a much more expansive range of forms in denoting speech act participants, and because they are not functionally restricted to addressee-reference in activating social pragmatic alternations, they offer the kind of maximally differentiated systems which enable the construction of typological generalizations and implicational universals. Introduction Benveniste was perhaps one of the first European scholars to note, if only in passing, how significantly patterns of interlocutor reference in Asian languages diverge from those found in European ones. In ‘Subjectivity in Language’, Benveniste (1966 [1958]) argues that the source of human subjectivity is to be found in language and, more specifically, in the act of self-reference by means of grammatically first person pronominals. It is in and through language that man [sic.] constitutes himself as a subject, because language alone establishes the concept of ‘ego’ in reality, in its reality which is that of the being. … ‘Ego’ is he who says ‘ego.’ That is where we see the foundation of ‘subjectivity,’ which is determined by the linguistic status of ‘person.’ (1966 [1958]: 224, n.b., ‘Ego’ means ‘I’ in Latin) This argument combines the Whorfian intuition that grammar conditions the categories of cognition with the Austinian intuition that speech brings social ontologies into being. Soon after introducing the idea that the universal source of subjectivity is deictic self-reference, Benveniste (1966 [1958]: 225-6) adds the following caveat: A language without the expression of person cannot be imagined. It can only happen that in certain languages, under certain circumstances, these ‘pronouns’ are deliberately omitted; this is the case in most of the Far Eastern societies, in which a convention of politeness imposes the use of periphrases or of special forms between certain groups of individuals in order to replace the direct personal references. But these usages only serve to underline the value of the avoided forms; it is the implicit existence of these pronouns that gives social and cultural value to the substitutes imposed by class relationships. For all his brilliance, here, in a sweep of the hand, Benveniste transforms the highly divergent (from a European perspective) patterns of Asian interlocuter reference into simply the exception that proves a universal rule. Though he correctly intuits that politeness and pronominality are complexly interwoven in Asian languages, in his formulation, social pragmatics simply reduces to a distinction between lexical categories: “true” pronouns are impolite while the use of non-pronominal “special forms” is polite. If we follow Benveniste’s own very well-reasoned definition of “true” pronominality we can see that such a dichotomy is unduly reductive and simply wrong. For Benveniste, “true” pronouns involve a necessarily reflexive relationship between the reference of tokens of a form type and participant role occupancy in the event of speaking within which the token occurs. So, for instance, a given token of “I” refers to the speech act participant who utters it. He writes: Each instance of use of a noun is referred to a fixed and ‘objective’ notion, capable of remaining potential or of being actualized in a particular object and always identical with the mental image it awakens. But the instances of the use of I do not constitute a class of reference since there is no ‘object’ definable as I to which these instances can refer in identical fashion. Each I has its own reference and corresponds each time to a unique being who is set up as such. (Benveniste 1966 [1956]: 218) And later: What then is the reality to which I or you refers? It is solely a ‘reality of discourse,’ and this is a very strange thing. I cannot be defined except in terms of ‘locution,’ not in terms of objects as a nominal sign is. I signifies ‘the person who is uttering the present instance of the discourse containing I.’ This instance is unique by definition and has validity only in its uniqueness. (…) I can only be identified by the instance of discourse that contains it and by that alone. (ibid.) The 1st and 2nd persons, but not the 3rd conform to this definition – making the 3rd person for Benveniste the ‘unmarked’ nonperson category. For our purposes, narrowing the terminology innovated by Agha (2007), we will characterize form types which denote either speaker or addressee, and thus whose tokens indexically refer to the occupants of those speech participant roles, as deictically selective. Nouns that refer to speech act participants in this manner we will simply call pronouns, regardless whether there is morphosyntactic agreement or cross-referencing of person features in the language in question. Benveniste’s treatment is empirically wrong for the simple reason that deictically selective terms in Southeast Asian languages are not universally judged as less polite than deictically non-selective ones. Deictically nonselective terms, like personal names, are often judged as highly impolite in addressee-reference (e.g. in addressing ascending generation lineal kin in Javanese, Karo, Thai, Chinese, Kachin, Karen [see Fleming & Slotta 2018 for citations]). Meanwhile, deictically selective terms grammaticalized from honorific nouns are often synchronically conceptualized as respectful. Honorific speaker- and addressee-referring terms grammaticalized from words meaning ‘servant/slave’ and ‘master/king’, respectively - are found in numerous Southeast languages, like Achenese, Burmese, Khmer, Malay, Thai, Lao and Vietnamese (Ishiyama 2010:23-24). However, although politeness does not reduce to the avoidance of pronouns, Benveniste nevertheless correctly intuited that pronominality and politeness are caught up with one another in important ways in the languages of East and Southeast Asia. There is evidence that speakers’ tend to view noun phrase types which refer only by virtue of role inhabitancy as less polite than noun phrase types which pick out interlocutors configurationally, by making allusion to value social networks of relations. Benveniste’s mistake was to telescope the relationship between referential and nonreferential indexical functions. That is, he saw a particular indexical architecture of reference, person deixis, as directly encoding the nonreferential indexical function of impoliteness. By thus identifying the semiotic means of achieving interlocutor reference (i.e. deictically selective versus non-selective noun phrase types) and the social pragmatic significances of those distinct ways of making reference (i.e. impoliteness and politeness, respectively), he sidestepped the question of the ways in which ideologies of interlocutor reference mediate the social meanings of alternant ways of referring to speech participants in East and Southeast Asian language communities. That said, we contend, that much of the texture of interlocutor reference as social practice in Asian speech communities relies precisely upon speakers’ own reflexive and ideological engagements with what choice of person referring expression says about the social relationship(s) between self and other(s). Our goal here will be to sketch out a framework for understanding the unique richness of interlocutor reference in the languages of East and Southeast Asia. In doing this we follow, in broad strokes, the model of Michael Silverstein (1985:513) for whom “[t]he total linguistic fact” is understood as determined in the interrelationships between “language structure, contextualized usage, and ideologies of language.” We look at the language structural features that have enabled the diachronic development of elaborate repertoires of non-deictic interlocutor referring forms, we draw on Vietnamese data to foreground discursive practices of interlocutor reference employing OCIR terms, and we suggest how these practices are seen as diagrammatic of (or iconically-indexical of) ideologies of valued social interdependency. This work will allow us to create a framework within which interlocuter reference appears as an intuitive domain of empirical inquiry for a form-functionally grounded social pragmatics of language. The unique attributes of speech participant reference in Asian languages have not only attracted the attention of Émile Benveniste. Semanticists and syntacticians, in particular, have increasingly been concerned with patterns interlocuter reference in Southeast and East Asian languages. Much of this literature is focally concerned with the question of whether referring expressions truly count as pronouns or not as judged on various theoretical and analytic criteria (see the literature on ‘pronominal imposters’ e.g. Collins 2014, Kaufman 2014, see also, Pham 2011). The particularities of the semantic and syntactic properties of interlocuter referring expressions in Asian languages have tended to occlude discussion of their non-referential and socially pragmatic properties. We suspect that the semantic and syntactic lines of research into grammatical person in Asian languages will be nourished by a deeper understanding of the social pragmatics of interlocutor reference. There are good reasons to believe that it will. As we now argue, speakers’ reflexive and ideological valuations of different kinds of acts of interlocutor reference engages with the language structural organization of deictic selectivity, channelling the historical development of the very patterns that are so interesting to syntacticians and semanticists. Gaining analytic purchase upon the semantics and syntax of grammatical person in Asian languages will thus require a deeper understanding of the social pragmatics of interlocuter reference. Open-class interlocuter reference [OCIR] in Southeast Asia The languages of Southeast Asia belong to at least five language families and though many of them share important typological characteristics, the region is still a hotbed of linguistic diversity. Nevertheless, many languages from the Austronesian, Austroasiatic, Tai-Kradai, and Sino-Tibetan families exhibit some remarkable commonalities in the patterning of interlocuter reference. In most languages exhibiting social pragmatic alternations in interlocuter reference, speakers employ one of a tightly circumscribed set of pronominal alternants to refer to self or interactional alter. In French, for instance, speaker reference alternates between je (1s), nous (1p), and on while addressee reference is limited to tu (2s) and vous (2p). In languages of Southeast Asia, contrastingly, a wide range of both pronominal and non-pronominal nouns, including titles, names, and most prominently, kin terms can all be felicitously employed in referring to both speaker and addressee. This use of deictically non-selective nouns in both speaker and addressee reference is essentially only attested in East and Southeast Asian languages. Looking beyond Southeast Asia, languages differ in the range of non-deictically selective nouns which are ubiquitously employed in interlocuter reference. The use of nouns in addressee-reference in argument position has a more widespread distribution. For Europe, Portuguese is often cited as a language of this sort, though OCIR is restricted to two nouns – a senhora [Madam] and o senhor [Sir] (Head 1976). Though the use of nouns in argument-position, addressee-reference is quite rare in European languages, it is much more common in the languages of South Asia. In Malayalam (Chandrasekhar 1970, 1977) and Sinhala, for instance, a wide range of noun can be employed in addressee-reference. As Table 1 illustrates, it is the use of nouns in speaker-reference which is the most marked formal means for achieving the function of interlocutor reference cross-linguistically. Though nouns may be used in speaker-reference, they often carry negative connotations outside of the SE Asian region. In English, for instance, the use of personal names for interlocuter reference is largely restricted to vocative address (i.e. non-argument position). In argument position, names are occasionally used in speaker-reference -- but such illeism is widely seen as self-aggrandizing and arrogant (e.g. Barford 2015). To summarize, a characteristic feature of Southeast Asian languages is a much more widespread use of open-class nouns in both addressee- and speaker-reference. We will call this ‘open-class interlocuter reference’, or OCIR, for short. Verb exhibits PERSON AGREEMENT with subject Honorific alternation in reference to… Use of an OPEN CLASS NOUN in reference to… SPEAKER ADDRESSEE SPEAKER ADDRESSEE SPEAKER ADDRESSEE ← REFERENT (= SUBJECT) ✓ ✓ X ✓ ☓ ☓ French EUROPE ✓ ✓ X ✓ ☓ ☓ German ✓ ✓ X ✓ ☓ ☓ Italian ✓ ✓ X ✓ ☓ ☓ Tamil SOUTH ASIA ☓ ☓ X ✓ ☓ ✓ Malayalam ☓ ☓ X ✓ ☓ ✓ Sinhala ☓ ☓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ Vietnamese S.-E. ASIA ☓ ☓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ Lao ☓ ☓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ Javanese Table 1: Exemplification of variation in patterns of interlocuter reference across three sociolinguistic areas in Eurasia. To give an impression of how widespread OCIR is in East and Southeast Asia, Map 1 presents a survey of forty languages treated for this trait. As the map indicates, OCIR is not present in all languages in this region. Indeed, there is an important correlation between OCIR and social organization, with larger scale and more rank stratified (cf. Müller & Weymuth 2017). Map 1: Languages with OCIR in speaker-reference Language structure and the affordances of OCIR The globally circumscribed distribution of OCIR begs the question: Why is OCIR only attested in East and Southeast Asian languages? The most important factor here has to be cultural diffusion. The historical importance of Imperial China in both Southeast Asia and in East Asia combined with the particular distribution of OCIR argues in favor of classical Chinese as the locus for the initial diffusion of this pattern. As noted above, polite speaker- and addressee-referring pairs like ‘slave’ and ‘master’, ‘head’ and ‘foot’, are shared across distinct language communities, suggesting calque-borrowings of honorific formulae. Further, as Map 1 illustrates, OCIR is attested in two distinct locales: in addition to Southeast Asian languages like Burmese, Khmer, Vietnamese, Thai, Malay, Acehnese, Javanese, Madurese and Timorese, OCIR is also attested in (and very thoroughly described for) Japanese. (Korean likely historically employed nouns in speaker-reference, and still exhibits an addressee-honorific distinction in 1st person pronouns [see discussion below of 1st person honorific pronouns].) Although contemporary Chinese does not robustly employ open-class noun phrases in speaker-reference, historically usages of this sort were common in status-stratified interactions (Kadar 2005). Describing norms in Classical Chinese (500BC-200AD), Norman (1988: 90) writes: When speaking to a person of higher station it was necessary to have recourse to various honorific substitutes. Among the common substitutes employed in this way were zǐ ‘master’ and jūn ‘lord’. Similarly, when addressing superiors it was common to use deferential forms for the first-person pronouns; in Classical texts, for example, lower-level functionaries often use chén ‘servant, vassal’ when talking to people of higher rank. Given the historical importance of Imperial China in both Japan and Mainland Southeast Asia combined with the historical attestation of the addressee-honorific use of nouns in speaker-reference in Chinese, it seems likely that OCIR developed in Classical Chinese and that this pattern of usage later diffused to other languages of the area through rampant bi and multilingualism. But this historical explanation is not fully satisfying, for it only defers the question of why this area (or rather responds to it with claims of pure historical contingency). What is elided here is the way in which language structural profile motivated and mediates the development of this pattern. Isolating morphology has long been recognized as an areal feature in East and Southeast Asia (Enfield 2017, 2020). Correlated with isolating structure is a lack of morphosyntactic agreement. And because that includes person agreement and cross-referencing, this factor conditions the grammaticalization of deictic selectivity in these languages. In languages with person cross-referencing, morphosyntactic concord effectively filters the set of nouns which can be employed in interlocuter reference by a principle of deictic selectivity. Whether this rises to level of syntactic agreement, as in many European languages, or is simply a principle of co-textual parallelism by grammatical category (cf. Halliday and Hasan’s 1976 ‘texture’), the effect is to heighten the markedness of deictically nonselective terms as employed in speaker- or addressee-reference. From the perspective of formal linguistics, one might consider this markedness effect in terms of grammaticality. Kin terms may be used in infant-directed speech in English, but they typically take 3rd person agreement (“Daddy(=Sp.) wants coffee” but not “*Daddy(=Sp.) want coffee”). Similarly, in illeism, use of name for speaker-reference as grammatical subject is combined with 3rd person agreement in the verb. Mismatches in the person features of co-referential noun and affix or clitic are rare cross-linguistically (see Wechsler’s 2009 survey where Farsi the unique counter-example to the generalization). The purposive use of person-feature mismatching constructions is associated with what Ferguson (1977, see also 1991) calls simplified registers, suggesting a motivated pragmatic analogy between ungrammatical speech and the characterological figure of incompletely socialized quasi-members of the speech community (e.g. foreigners, children). In sum, it appears that the isolating structural profile of SE Asian languages has had important “collateral effects” on the social pragmatics of interlocuter reference (Sidnell & Enfield 2012). Grammatical person is weakly established in many languages of the region, being an attribute essentially limited to a few independent pronouns. This means that the use of deictically non-selective forms in argument position does not condition problems of agreement or cross-referencing elsewhere in the morphosyntax of the language. We indicate this correlation between lack of person agreement and OCIR in Table 1. At least impressionistically, it appears that the reduction of person marking between 2nd and 3rd person may catalyze the use of nouns in addressee-reference. Both Malayalam and Sinhala lack person agreement in the verb, and in contemporary Brazilian Portuguese the distinction between 2nd and 3rd person has been collapsed. The social pragmatics of Southeast Asian interlocutor reference Inasmuch as our goal is to understand the social pragmatics of interlocuter reference in this region, we must carefully distinguish social pragmatic functions of interlocuter referring expressions from their semantic and syntactic ones. Following Silverstein (1976) honorific pronouns can be understood as entailing two distinct pragmatic functions laminated onto the same signal form. On the one hand, pronouns (e.g. English you) are referentially indexical, that is to say, they refer to the individual who occupies the interactional role of addressee for that specific token of the pronoun. They are denotational indexicals (or deictics) in the sense that they imply both an indexical rule of interpretation -- the referent is the addressee of this token -- and predicate symbolic sense properties of that referent (e.g. that it is a discrete entity which is, either categorically or prototypically, human, that it is a grammatical subject, etc.). On the other hand, where distinct pronouns can be employed to successfully refer to the occupant of a given speech participant role (e.g. French tu versus vous), alternants additionally non-referentially index the social relationship between speaker and addressee (e.g., as one of familiar solidarity or respectful reserve, among many, many other contextually contoured interpretations). In many languages, honorific interlocuter referring expressions are derived via the “skewing” of otherwise semantic features. As documented by Head (1978), the most common formal resources for honorification cross-linguistically are tropes upon semantic number and grammatical person. Nonsingular numbers often function as honorifics cross-linguistically (e.g., plural number in French, dual number in Kharia). And 3rd person anaphors are often recruited to serve as addressee-referring honorifics (e.g. German Sei, Italian Lei). On analogy to the study of European “address systems”, we might think that the use of open class nouns are considered polite because of their “indirectness” – they treat speech participant as if not present by using grammatically 3rd person forms, and thus do not impose upon them (Brown and Levinson 1987). Such indirectness treatments (cf. Silverstein 1976, Malsch 1987) fail to (a.) attend to the weakness of grammatical person in these languages, and thus its incapacity to provide a stable source for tropes of indirectness, and (b.) account for the way in which the social pragmatics of nominal interlocuter reference is intimately linked up with the rich sense semantics of open-class nouns. Nouns are not more polite than pronouns by virtue of their deictic nonselectivity but because of the way they offer a rich semantic characterization of the social statuses, roles or attributes that serve as metonyms for entitlements to deference. That is, the semantics of nouns like ‘master’ and ‘slave’ are exploited, when used in addressee- or speaker-reference, respectively, to entail their addressee-honorific social pragmatic effects. And of course, those same semantic affordances can be exploited to antihonorific effects too (cf. the impolite OC noun in Vietnamese, thằng ‘guy’). Nevertheless, the correlation between rich sense semantics and deictic nonselectivity does likely motivate an identification of this semiotic-functional organization of reference with impoliteness, however locally conceptualized. But the distinction between the two categories is figurational, depending upon the different modes of ‘backing’ reference in pronominal and nominal interlocuter reference, respectively. Pronominal reference depends only upon the evanescent and local discursive context for backing reference. In polite OCIR reference, however, reference relies upon frameworks of valued kinship or professional relationships – role relationships that prototypically transcend one discursive event – for their referential backing. To see this we must reflect on how reference to speech participants is achieved in OCIR. As Luong (1990: 11-12) pointed out, the use of common nouns for reference to speaker and addressee, necessitates a mapping from denotational to interactional text via the medium of institutionalized role relationships (see also Agha 2007). So, in his example, the sentence Mẹ đã mua cho bố cái mũ hôm qua rồi M PST bought BEN father CL hat yesterday already Can, depending on the institutionalized role relations of the speaker and addressee, mean any of the following: (a) ‘I already bought the hat for you yesterday.’ (b) ‘You already bought the hat for me …’ (c) ‘I already bought the hat for father …’ (d) ‘Mother already bought the hat for me …’ (e) ‘You already bought the hat for father …’ (f) ‘Mother already bought the hat for you ....’ (g) ‘Mother already bought the hat for father ....’ On the basis of such an example we can make two important observations on the use of kin terms for interlocuter reference in Vietnamese. First, it is often the case in a language like Vietnamese that the addressee is not identified by a term that refers to him or her, but rather by implication of the term used in speaker self-reference (i.e. when the speaker refers to herself as em ‘younger sibling’ she shows that she is addressing the one person present who is older than she, not the several other persons who are younger). That is, choice of speaker-referring expression contributes to addressivity. Second, in a language again like Vietnamese the distinction between reference and address is not as clear as it is in those languages that rely primarily on pronouns. Although there are particles that, when attached to a common noun like a kinterm, unambiguously signal reference to a third party (that is, a person, who, whether present or not, is not an addressee of the utterance) the absence of such a particle does not necessarily imply that the individual referred to is the addressee and indeed such unmarked forms occur in utterances where another participant has clearly been selected as the addressee. The distinction between address and reference - which figures so centrally in the study of kinship terms and, by extension, kinship generally - is something of a language specific artifact. Where unsupported by a robust grammar of person, it is at best a pragmatic implication not a semantically coded component of the message. Practices of interlocutor reference and modes of meta-semiotic construal Looking at the Vietnamese case in slightly more detail we can note two important aspects of interlocutor reference in this language that help to shape the larger culture of language use to which we alluded earlier (see Silverstein 1985). First, we may note that the ubiquitous use of kinterms in interlocutor reference results in pervasive age-grading. A recent study (Sidnell 2021) found that more than 85% (n=213) of all references to speaker and addressee in a sample of Vietnamese conversation were accomplished by the use of kinterms (pronouns accounted for just 12%). Because all kinship terms indicate a difference of either age or generation they are not, with one important exception (Sidnell and Shohet 2013) used reciprocally. Rather each occasion of interlocutor reference serves to position the participants in terms of relative age. But, importantly, what is invoked by such usages is not an abstract notion of older versus younger but rather a relation between kin construed in terms of relative seniority. This has a number of practical consequences. Most obviously, by virtue of this system a speaker is obligated to keep track of the relative ages of all participants and to adjust their own modes of self and other reference accordingly. A single speaker may be required to shift between self-reference with, e.g., em ‘younger sibling’ and chị ‘elder sister’ according to whom she is directing her talk. More significantly for present purposes, the widespread use of kinterms provides the grounds for a cultural conceptualization of face-to-face interaction. An oft-cited Vietnamese expression demands that one, kính trên, nhường dưới ‘respect those above, yield to those below’ – a characterization of social relations in terms of asymmetrical yet mutual obligation and entitlement which fits hand-in-glove with the pervasive practices of kinship-based interlocutor reference (see Sidnell 2021). Any communicative encounter is, in other words, susceptible to analogical comparison with the social relations that normatively characterize those of the Vietnamese family and a speaker’s relation to the addressee is always construable as analogous to that between junior and senior kin, a relation characterizable not simply in terms of deference, politeness and hierarchy but also mutual obligation and sentiment (e.g. hiếu ‘filial piety’). So while Vietnamese is a language in which, as Geertz (1960: 248) proposed of Javanese, “it is nearly impossible to say anything without indicating the social relationship between the speaker and the listener”, the use of kinterms actually narrows the range and type of social relations in terms of which interactions between speaker and addressee, self and other are conceived. Since kinterms, unlike participant deictics, are two place predicates they necessarily cast the referent in terms of his or her relation to some other person, typically another speech participant, so that, if a speaker addresses the other as ‘elder brother’ they thereby cast themselves as ‘younger sibling’. Any act of speaking thereby not only establishes the speaker as a subject a la Benveniste but at the same time positions that subject in relation to some set of others. Second, the ubiquitous use of kinterms provides for the common practice of referential perspective shift – the recentering of the indexical origo from the speaker of the utterance to some other, more junior, person, whether that be the addressee, a referred to third party or a non-participant in the speech event (see Luong 1984, Luong and Sidnell 2020). Such perspective shift is of course what allows an utterance such as Mẹ đã mua cho bố cái mũ hôm qua rồi to be read in so many different ways. For instance, if said by a woman to her husband to mean “I already bought you a hat yesterday” it involves the speaker adopting the perspective of her and the addressee’s own child. The speaker may also adopt the perspective of a junior addressee. So, for instance, if a father is talking to his son, Tuấn, about Tuấn’s older brother Kiến who is also present, he may address Tuấn either as con ‘child’ (i.e. the father’s/speaker’s perspective) or as em ‘younger sibling’ (i.e. the son’s/addressee’s perspective in relation to his older brother Kiến). Now, importantly, such perspective shifts are not restricted to interaction within families. An older male speaker may for instance address a younger man in his own generation as em ‘younger sibling’ or as chú ‘father’s younger brother’. In the latter case, the speaker adopts the perspective of his own child (who may or may not be present, indeed, who may or may not exist) in addressing the younger man. As noted above, kinterms, being two place predicates, necessarily characterize the referent in relation to some other person. But the way in which kinterms are employed in interlocutor reference does not always map the two places (technically, kin propositus and kin referent) onto the interactional roles of speaker and addressee – as would be the case in canonical vocative kin address in English. On the contrary, these practices of perspective shift take this embedding one step further by casting the relation between speaker and hearer in terms of a triadic (or polyadic in more complex cases) relation which can be schematically represented as follows: Figure 1. Schematic representation of two possible addressee reference terms, one with perspective shift (chú), one without (em). These dimensions of Vietnamese interlocutor reference are subject to various kinds of metapragmatic construal (terminology after Agha 2015). To give but one example, Marxist revolutionaries sought to suture the rich fictive kinship usages towards their social and political ends. Revolutionaries did not so much attempt to abolish the hierarchical relations implicated in practices of interlocutor reference as to redirect the sentiments of loyalty and piety which they carried away from the family narrowly conceived and toward the newly founded communist state. While insisting that more extreme forms of honorification be eliminated (see Luong 1988) the Marxists promoted the continued use of kinterms, and especially sibling terms in everyday contexts of social encounter. And so, when, in May of 1946, regulations for the National Armed Forces were released, these dealt quite meticulously with certain aspects of language. Enlistees were required not only to be at least eighteen and declared fit by an army doctor, but also to know how to read and write in quốc ngữ. With respect to address and self-reference, the regulations indicated that superiors would call their men anh (older brother), while lower ranking persons would address those higher in rank either as ông (grandfather) or anh. When on duty the familiar pronouns mày and tao were not to be used, even between persons of equivalent status (see Marr 2013). Practices of referential perspective shift are similarly subject to various forms of construal and enregisterment. Most often, perspective shift is cast as a mode of socialization and, indeed, one way speakers themselves refer to this practice is with the expression gọi thay cho con/cháu ‘refer as would a child/grandchild’. Yet clearly socialization is but one possible framing for these pervasive practices of referential perspective shift. Consider for instance the way in which Marxist revolutionaries negotiated their relation to Hồ Chí Minh. As reported in Luong (1988), although the official Việt Minh newspaper, Cứu Quốc, referred to Hồ as cụ ‘great-grandfather’ or Chủ tịch ‘Chairman’, in more informal contexts, the pragmatic presuppositions of solidarity and brotherhood were preserved through the use of bác in reference to Hồ and Hồ’s use of chú to refer to his younger addressees. Here then the use of bác in reference to Hồ implied that the speaker was adopting the perspective of his or her own child in relation to whom Hồ was figured as father’s older brother. Meanwhile, Hồ’s use of chú to refer to his younger comrades involved him adopting the perspective of his own non-existent child in relation to whom the addressee was cast as father’s younger brother (see Luong 1988: 248). Such practices had the effect of casting relations between communist party members and their leader as analogous to those between junior and senior kin within an extended family unit. Conclusion Linguistic anthropology – like anthropology more generally – must engage in the critical work of, to use Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2000) phrase, “provincializing Europe.” To be sure, linguistic anthropology in the Boasian mold emerged precisely when scholars began to wrestle with non-European languages on their own terms. Nevertheless, theory building in anthropology and linguistics – if not on its guard – can all too easily slip into universalizing the European. Models, whether of modernity or of grammar, which take Europe cultural and linguistic form as proxies for empirical defaults or normative ideals are not hard to find. Despite his genius and insight, this is what Benveniste did in ‘Subjectivity in Language.’ Beyond the incompleteness of his analytic model for capturing the empirical realities of Asian interlocutor reference (see the Introduction), an even more serious problem with Benveniste’s identification of subjectivity and 1st person deixis is how it transmogrifies European linguistic form into the basis for a universal ideal of subjectivity. His assumption, remember, is that the subjectivity constituted by the use of the only available and therefore pragmatically neutral 1st person pronoun, je, represents a universal and uniquely authentic substratum of human experience. Subjectivity, here, is a Eurocentric projection from the grammatical resources of Standard Average European languages in which, of course, Benveniste was steeped. But its normative sting is not eliminated simply by this critical knowledge, for this linguistic ideology still figurates the speakers of Asian languages exhibiting rich sociopragmatic variation in speaker-reference as not fully actualized subjects. In referring to himself, a Vietnamese infant or young child will use a kinterm that characterizes his or her relation to the interlocutor (and possibly others who are co-present). In that sense, there is no linguistic provision for a socially independent, one-place “subjectivity” for a language acquiring child. Despite their formal and functional plenitude, patterns of Southeast Asian interlocutor reference are read as lacking, as deficient. The absence of a unique and ubiquitous 1st person pronoun is read as tantamount to the repression of a fully actualized human subjecthood and agency. Indeed, this European linguistic ideology has looped back, informing the thinking of some Southeast Asian language reformers. Vietnamese advocates (e.g. Phan Khôi 1887-1959) for language reform in the 1930s suggested that the common practice of using kinterms (and titles) in interlocutor reference was an impediment to the emergence of a truly modern consciousness based in the experience of an autonomous subject. They sought to reconstruct consciousness on a European model through the introduction of a “neutral” 1st singular pronoun the use of which would not implicate the speaker in a set of specific social relations. As Marr (2000: 787) puts it, this was to provide a means for referring “to the self without reference to ‘the other,’ whether high or low, kin or non-kin, male or female.” For these language reformers, traditional practices of interlocutor reference were indelibly tied to the maintenance of Confucian hierarchies and, correspondingly, a less dynamic form of individual consciousness (see e.g. Marr 1981, Tran 2017). But it is only from a European point of departure that Asian interlocutor reference can be seen as lacking. Quite to the contrary, the empirical richness of Southeast Asian interlocutor reference argues for these languages having a central place in any comparative or typological framework that would seek to understand the social significances of variation in the ways in which speech participants are referred to in interaction. Because socially significant variation occurs in both pronominal and non-pronominal forms, and in both speaker- and addressee-reference, ‘address systems’ in these languages present a much more elaborate space of social pragmatic variation than do European languages, like French, Spanish and German, which have held an outsized empirical importance in theorization of the social meaningfulness of alternations in acts of referring to speech act participants. Indeed, these European empirical exemplars have so fully colonized how sociolinguists conceptualize this space of variation that indexing deference towards co-interlocutors has largely been conflated with the act of referring to them. But, as scholars of East and Southeast Asian languages have long known, the social pragmatics of ‘address’ are only half of the equation. Alternations in speaker-reference in languages like Vietnamese, Indonesian, and Thai are just as important in signifying social relatedness (and indeed, in entailing discourse addressees) as are T/V-type alternations in 2nd person pronouns in languages like Icelandic, Greek, and Italian. From the perspective of a comparative linguistic anthropology, ‘address systems’ are a component part of a more encompassing system of interlocutor reference. 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