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Subject honorification and the position of subjects in Japanese

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Abstract

Subject honorification in Japanese is often characterized as targeting subjects, but in this article, I propose to formulate it as vP-level agreement, where an honorific head agrees with an argument (carrying the semantic feature [+honorific]) that appears in its associated Spec,vP. This proposal provides a straightforward account for some honorification facts which cannot be accounted for if subject honorification is simply taken to target subjects: namely, (1) the fact that subject honorification is often, but not always, possible at two distinct structural levels in the aspectual construction where the main verb is followed by the aspectual verb iru; (2) the fact that in the possessive construction with the animate verb iru ‘have’, subject honorification can target not only the dative subject but also the nominative object. Furthermore, on the basis of what I call ‘the kara-subject construction’, the overt constituent position of subjects is shown to vary according to whether T contains the Case feature [+nominative] to license a nominative argument: Subjects undergo raising to Spec,TP when T carries [+nominative], but when T lacks it, subjects are not raised to Spec,TP.

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  1. Department of Linguistics, Graduate School of Humanities, Kobe University, 1-1 Rokkodai-cho, Nada-ku, Kobe, 657-8501, Japan

    Hideki Kishimoto

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Kishimoto, H. Subject honorification and the position of subjects in Japanese. J East Asian Linguist 21, 1–41 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10831-011-9083-2

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