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The present paper addresses itself to original sociolinguistic data in the area of social honorifics. A key distinction is drawn between situational honorifics, which are triggered nonverbally, and discoursal honorifics, which are instantiated by verbal cues. The main objective of this study is to examine Jordanians’ general awareness of such honorifics and see whether this awareness correlates with age, sex, and social background as social variables. For this purpose, three questionnaires (reception-based vs.
production-based vs. adjacency-pair-based) were prepared and subsequently administered to 944 Jordanian subjects. The results show that the Jordanians’ overall degree of awareness of such honorifics is quite high at about 79 percent. While the empirical data do not show a significant awareness correlation with the type of questionnaire, clear correlations are established with the social variables of age, sex, and social background, where the age variable is found to be the strongest and the sex variable the weakest.
