Abstract:
This thesis looks into the linguistic ideology of honorification in the Santal community using anthropological perspective. It investigates use of personal pronouns, i.e. first and second person pronouns in contexts of kinship and stranger to understand the cultural construal of honorification in this community. The ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in three Santal villages from Asansol, located in the southwestern part of West Bengal. For analysis, concepts from evolutionary biology are utilized to explain these relationships and contextualize them within this community framework. Further, cognitive linguistic tools of conceptual metaphor and image schema are employed to explain functions of personal pronouns in certain affinal relationships. Through development of an eclectic framework based on structuralism and linguistic relativity, this thesis provides a synthesis of these two theories that take seemingly opposite stances about culture with focus on universality and individuality of culture respectively. It also provides a fresh perspective to the description of honor by distinguishing it from respect.

Keywords: Honorification, Linguistics, Pronouns, Anthropology, Cognition, Santali