Honorific

An honorific is a grammatical form, typically a word or affix, that is socially deictic It expresses, as at least part of its meaning, the relative social status of the speaker with .

• the addressee

• a bystander, or

• some other referent.

Examples (French) :
The second-person pronoun forms tu and vous indicate, as part of their meaning, the speaker’s social status relative to the addressee.
Here are some kinds of honorifics:

• An addressee honorific is an honorific in a system in which a level of status of the addressee relative to the speaker is expressed through a choice made among linguistic alternants, irrespective of whether the alternants refer to the addressee.
• A bystander honorific is an honorific in which the social status of some other person present is expressed through choices made among linguistic alternants.
• A referent honorific is an honorific for which both the referent and the target of the expression of relative social status are the same.