Exploring Allocutivity in Japanese Through the Window of Embedding
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Abstract
This 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.