Grammaticalization of politeness: A contrastive study of German, English and Korean

This dissertation investigates the development of politeness in language. It examines polite forms and polite routines by investigating the processes that lead to a polite output. I present a model of language change where politeness is a product of two processes: grammaticalization and pragmaticalization. I provide supporting evidence for this model from my contrastive study, which consists of lexical and phonetic data in German, Korean and English.; Chapter 1 introduces the topic. Chapter 2 provides an overview of previous approaches to politeness theory and works on politeness in German in particular. It clarifies the concepts and etymologies of politeness for the languages discussed here.; Chapter 3 presents the theoretical background of grammaticalization and pragmaticalization processes. Both, grammaticalization and pragmaticalization are very similar processes of language change in that they both involve semantic loss, but they differ substantially by their outputs, e.g., grammaticalization leads to honorifics, grammatical markers and pronouns, whereas pragmaticalization results in routines and formulae.; In chapter 4, I introduce my survey on linguistic politeness in German, Korean and English. I test a series of speech acts in the form of a discourse completion test. Results suggest that Korean employs a high rate of grammaticalized polite forms and pragmaticalized polite routines, whereas English shows a higher usage of individualized responses. German, with polite grammatical forms and polite routines, yields a position between Korean and English.; Chapter 5 investigates the grammaticalization of politeness by analyzing the data of the survey in depth. Here, I examine pronouns, terms of address/reference, and kinship terms with the main focus on German and Korean. I also analyze polite routines and formulae in forms of speech acts for occurrences of pragmaticalization.; Chapter 6 reports my study on one prosodic feature of politeness: Pitch in connection with politeness. A phonetic study with native speakers of German, English and Korean indicates that politeness is expressed via a lower pitch, while a higher pitch indicates intimacy and closeness. Finally, chapter 7 summarizes the findings and suggests research possibilities and directions for future interlinguistic and intercultural analyses of politeness.