Honorific agreement in Japanese
- Honorific agreement in Japanese
1. Introduction
Subject honorification is one well-known diagnostic for subjecthood in Japanese, and is often thought to target “subjects”.1 In this squib, I will provide a little more structurally oriented characterization of subject honorification, and propose that subject honorification involves agreement licensed at the level of vP: that is, subject honorification is rendered licit when an honorific head successfully agrees with an argument located in Spec of vP, comprising the honorific verb. It is suggested that the target of subject honorification can be defined without reference to the notion of “subject”, and that the “subject” orientation of subject honorification emerges as a natural consequence of vP-level agreement. The proposed analysis can capture one important exception for the “subject-orientation” generalization on subject honorification, which would remain unaccounted for if subject honorification were held to target only subjects. The facts of subject honorification also lead to the conclusion that when arguments undergo A-movement to tp, they need to go through all types of vPs in the clause.
2. Subject Honorification as Vp-Level Agreement
In Japanese, subject honorification has the property that some feature of a nominal is reflected on the verb morphologically. In this sense, subject honorification can be regarded as an instance of agreement (see Mikami 1970, Toribio 1990, Kishimoto 2000, Ura 2000, Hasegawa 2006, among others). Subject honorification, as its name suggests, is often thought to target subjects (that are judged to be worthy of respect contextually) (see Harada 1976, Shibatani 1978). This structural characterization is [End Page 405] not accurate enough, however, because it cannot account for some facts of aspectual constructions, as I will discuss below. In this squib, it is argued that a certain local relation needs to be established between a subject honorificmarker and its associated argument in order for subject honorification to be licit, and further, that this structural relation can be characterized without appealing to the notion of “subject”.
In the following discussion, subject honorification (i.e., honorific agreement) is shown to be sensitive to the hierarchical position of subjects. To begin, let us consider the aspectual construction given in (1), where the main predicate osieru ‘tell, teach’ is followed by an aspectual verb iru ‘be’.
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1. {Ken-ga/Ken-kara} Eri-ni zizitu-o osie-te i-ru.
Ken-nom/Ken-from Eri-dat fact-acc teach be-pres
‘Ken is telling the fact to Eri.’
In (1), the subject of the verb osieru may be marked with either the oblique kara ‘from’ or the nominative case ga, due to the fact that it is thematically construed as “agentive” source. The difference in subject marking has a syntactic effect. When the subject bears the nominative case ga, the subject honorific maker o-. . . ni-naru may appear in either the main or the aspectual verb.2
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2. Sensei-ga Eri-ni zizitu-o { o -osie- ni-nat -te i-ru/osie-te o -ide- ni-nar -u}.
teacher-nom Eri-dat fact-acc teach-hon be-pres/teach be-hon-pres
‘The teacher is telling the fact to Eri.’
On the other hand, when the subject is marked with kara ‘from’, a contrast in acceptability emerges depending on where the honorific marker is attached, as shown in (3).
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3. Sensei-kara Eri-ni zizitu-o { o -osie- ni-nat -te i-ru/*osie-te o -ide- ni-nar -u}.
teacher-from Eri-dat fact-acc teach-hon be-pres/teach be-hon-pres
‘The teacher is telling the fact to Eri.’
If the subject receives kara-marking, the honorificmarker can be attached only to the main verb. When it is attached to the aspectual verb, subject honorification cannot be directed to the kara-phrase; hence the sentence is not acceptable in this case.
The difference in the possibility of subject honorification observed between (2) and (3) can be attributed to the fact that the kara-subject, unlike the nominative subject, stays in a vP-internal position without undergoing subject raising to tp. The structural position of the two types of subjects may be discerned by the availability of npi interpretation for the indeterminate pronoun dare ‘anyone’ in (4), where the Q particle...
