The compatibility between expressive elements: Kinship terms, pronouns, and racial slurs in Vietnamese

The present study investigates the Compatibility Condition (CC) for multiple expressivelements in Vietnamese. We identify Vietnamese kinship terms, pronouns, and racial slurs aexpressives (i.e. conventional implicature (Potts 2005)), where different expressive iteminteract. We find that there are co-occurrences of expressives with different attitudes (e.gweak/strong negative) and with expressive elements that have honorific and antihonorifiproperties. Under controlled occurrences, we examine what CC is and how it is measured. Wpropose the CC model and the CC index for occurrences of Vietnamese emotive-expressiveand honorific-expressives. Furthermore, the CC may be intentionally flouted as a repastrategy. Finally, we show that emotion and honorific dimensions operate interdependently oautonomously and provide support for autonomy. The implication found is that interactioexists among various Vietnamese expressives, necessitating the compatibility constraint, whilsupporting multidimensionality (Potts 2005 et seq.), with at least two expressive dimensions.