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INTRODUCTION
The purpose of this paper is to examine the formation over time of a lexical honorific speech register in Tonga, a small Polynesian nation state in the South Pacific. Tongan lea faka'eiki, or 'chiefly language' is locally conceptualized as consisting of two levels of honorific vocabulary, a higher level for the king and a lower level for chiefs. The honorific words are substituted for everyday words that are understood to be their semantic equivalents. Tongans view their chiefly language as a part of their history that connects the pre-European contact political order with the present nation state political order. Use of historical linguistic methods to determine sources of the honorific lexicon makes it possible to consider honorific register formation within a framework of greater temporal and spatial scope than has been typical for studies of honorific register formation. This greater scope for register formation in turn enables us to identify some properties of honorific register formation that have either not been documented before or have been given little attention.
Most notably, we are able to show how different aspects of an ongoing living honorific system have been formed at different periods in time and through different linguistic processes. In the Tongan case lexical items in the higher level of honorification have honorific cognates in Samoan not found in the lower level of honorification, suggesting a regionally shared honorific vocabulary during the period before the two languages became completely separated. The lower level of honorification is in turn formed more exclusively than the higher level through processes of semantic extension of every day words, coupled with productive Tongan morphological processes of word formation.
This difference, combined with cultural and archaeological knowledge about the emergence of complex chiefdoms in Western Polynesia, indicates that the higher level of honorification is both older, going back in time, and part of a regional pattern of honorific systems. This regional pattern is associated with Tongan political influence and control over the flow of resources throughout Western Polynesia from 950 A.D. to the time of contact with Western Europeans in the late eighteenth century, sometimes referred to at the Tu'i Tonga Empire. The lower level of honorification, lacking honorific cognates in Samoan, has...