Re: Labov's latest discovery in sociolinguistics

* António Marques wrote:

Oliver Cromm wrote:
* Paul J Kriha wrote:

"Joachim Pense" <snob@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:fse7f3$nt$01$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Oliver Cromm wrote:
* /r Joe Fineman wrote:
Nathan Sanders <nsanders@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
In article <47e5b9ec$1@xxxxxxxxxxxx>,
I don't understand. "Your Majesty" is a 3rd person?
Syntactically it is, at least for the purposes of subject-verb
agreement:

Your Majesty looks wonderful tonight.
*Your Majesty look wonderful tonight.
We do, however, stop short of "Your Majesty is entitled to its
opinion".
But it should be "his/her", not "your", right?
Of course it should not.
Joachim
Hard to say, it depends who you're talking with.

While addressing the Queen, you say "Your Majesty is entitled
to your opinion".

So "Your Majesty" is third person for agreement purposes, but second for
pronominal reference purposes. Interesting.

I don't think it operates on that level. Cf the grammatical 'Your
Majesty is entitled to my opinion'. In the normal example, the owners of
'majesty' and 'opinion' simply coincide.

You're right, I see now.

What confused me is the use of two different kinds of address in the
same sentence, instead of more logically consistent, but maybe
unrealistic: "Your Majesty is entitled to Your Majesty's opinion."

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