Exploring allocutivity in Japanese through the window of embedding / ǂc by Keita Ishii
Date
2025
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
his dissertation explores the syntax and semantics of Japanese utterance honorifics (UHs) —morphological markers that convey respect toward the addressee — through the window of their embedding, aiming to contribute to the crosslinguistic research on allocutivity. While allocutive marking is cross-linguistically considered to be a root clause phenomenon (e.g., Oyharc¸abal, 1993; McCready, 2019; Miyagawa, 2012; 2017; Portner et al., 2019; 2022 among others), Japanese UHs may appear in various embedded contexts, sometimes even within clauses that lack strong root-like properties. This contrast raises the central question of this thesis: why Japanese UHs can be embedded relatively freely unlike the allocutive marking in other languages? ☐ The main body of this thesis consists of three major discussions apart from one chapter summarizing the basic facts about the three mophological variants of Japanese UH marking and their embedding. First, I examine whether the embeddability of Japanese UHs is due to the embeddability of the specific layer for UHs, which I call ‘cP’ following Portner et al. (2019), building on the previous studies on Japanese UHs (Miyagawa, 2012; 2022; Yamada, 2019; Tomioka and Ishii, 2022). Through the comparisons of embedded UHs with other embedded root clause phenomena in Japanese and with embedded allocutivity in Magahi, I argue against Yamada’s (2019) view that cP can be freely embedded in Japanese. Instead, I propose that cP is generally restricted to root clauses following Portner et al. (2019) and Tomioka and Ishii (2022). ☐ Second, two psycholinguistic experiments were conducted to investigate the nature of the Consistency Requirement of UH embedding and whether the licensing of embedded UHs involve a long distance agreement as Tomioka and Ishii (2022) suggested. The Consistency Requirement is a restriction on UH embedding that the matrix clause needs to register higher or at least the same level of honorificity when UHs are embedded. The results of the epxeriments showed that the honorificity level of two clauses are mediated pragmatically as Yamada (2019) proposed. There was no positive evidence for the long-distance agreement to license embedded UHs proposed by Tomioka and Ishii (2022). ☐ Finally, building on the findings and discussions above, I propose a novel analysis that Japanese UHs are expressive honorific particles anaphoric to the speaker/addressee arguments in the local cP, but not an instance of addresee agreement in contrast to Miyagawa (2012; 2017; 2022). I also argue that the embeddability of Japanese UH markers is explained through their syntactic positions and the size of phrases that each complementizer selects, following Tomioka and Ishii (2022). A crosslinguistic case study of UH embedding in Burmese further supports the generalization that the syntactic position of allocutive morphology governs its embeddability.
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Keywords
Allocutivity, Japanese, Semantics, Syntax, Utterance honorifics