Honorificity in the nominal spine: a DP-internal account

The nominal structure proposed in Ritter & Wiltschko (2021), Wiltschko (2021) and McDonald et al. (in prep) divides languages with honorificity into two types – type I languages that recycle their phi-features to encode honorificity and type II languages that lack phi-features and instead have dedicated (non)-honorific pronouns, called paranouns. This paper claims that this typology is not exhaustive and adds a third type considering the honorificity pattern in Maithili, an Eastern Indo-Aryan language. I propose that this third type of language encodes honorificity inside the DP layer, as opposed to the other two types that encode it outside the DP. I also show that other languages in the Indo-Aryan family show the same pattern, at least partially, as Maithili.