Abstract
It has been suggested in the literature that the social-deictic meaning contributed by honorific expressions (in Japanese, Korean, Thai, etc.) belong to a dimension isolated from that of proffered (or at-issue) content. This work demonstrates that, like proffered contents and presuppositions, honorific meanings may interact with a proffered content introduced elsewhere in a way that cannot be easily accounted for under the Pottsian multidimensional approach, and develops an alternative analysis using a “pseudo-multidimensional” framework.
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Notes
- 1.
The abbreviations in glosses are: Acc \(=\) accusative, AddrHon \(=\) addressee(-oriented) honorific, ARG1Hon \(=\) ARG1 honorific (subject-oriented honorific), ARG2Hon \(=\) ARG2 honorific (object-oriented honorific), Attr \(=\) attributive, Cop \(=\) copula, Dat \(=\) dative, DP \(=\) discourse particle, Gen \(=\) genitive, Ger \(=\) gerund, NegAux \(=\) negative auxiliary, Nom \(=\) nominative, Npfv \(=\) non-perfective auxiliary, PossHon \(=\) possessor honorific, Prs \(=\) present, Pst \(=\) past, Th \(=\) thematic wa (topic/ground marker).
- 2.
Oshima (2019) discusses that some referents may be assigned, and some honorifics—called negative honorifics or dishonorifics—are associated with, honorific values smaller than 0. The issue of negative honorification is not directly relevant to the purpose of the current work, and will be put aside.
- 3.
Expressions in small capitals refer to lexemes.
- 4.
McCready (2019) suggests that the effects of (4a) arise from a scale-based pragmatic principle along the lines of Maximize Presupposition. A potentially problematic issue with this idea is the existence of honorific variants which differ not only in honorific meaning but also in some other semantic components. An example of such a tuple of honorific variants is \(\langle \) kuru, irassharu\(\rangle \), where the first is a non-honorific verb meaning ‘come’, and the second is an ARG1 (subject-oriented) honorific covering the meanings of ‘come’, ‘go’, and ‘exist, be (located)’. I will not attempt here to settle the issue of whether (4a) can be reduced to a purely pragmatic process.
- 5.
ARG1 honorifics and ARG2 honorifics refer to those honorific predicates whose target of reverence is the referent of the least oblique (most prominent) argument (i.e., subject) and the second second-least oblique (most prominent) argument (e.g., dative object), respectively.
- 6.
Oshima’s (2016) treatment of CIs is based on the model developed in Oshima (2006a,b), where the operator called preditional plays a simlar role as transjunction.
- 7.
(25S) furthermore conversationally implicates that no junior members came. That is, (25S) would be misleading (though true) if uttered in a situation where, say five senior members and five junior members came. Such a situation, indeed, cannot be easily described—one would have to say something like:
Conversely, the variant of (25S) without the referent-honorific feature, (ii), conversationally implicates that no senior members come.
A similar “ineffability” issue arises when an argument denotes a group that is heterogenous in terms of honorability; in my judgment, (iii-a) and (iii-b) sound both deviant, and some sort of rephrasing has to be made to express the same propositional content in a pragmatically felicitous way (cf. (i) above).
Davis (2020) discusses that in a variety of the Yaeyaman language (genetically related to Japanese, belonging to the Japonic family), Kohama, an analog of (iii-a) is felicitous, and in two other varieties, Maezato and Hatoma, an analog of (iii-b) is felicitous. He further remarks that speakers of standard Japanese are divided into three groups: (i) those who reject both (iii-a,b), (ii) those who prefer (iii-a), and (iii) those who prefer (iii-b). Davis develops an account of this kind of cross- and intra-linguistic variation in terms of rankings of competing pragmatic constraints, which might be extendable to sentences like (25S) and its analogs in other dialects/languages.
- 8.
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Oshima, D.Y. (2021). Against the Multidimensional Approach to Honorific Meaning: A Solution to the Binding Problem of Conventional Implicature. In: Okazaki, N., Yada, K., Satoh, K., Mineshima, K. (eds) New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. JSAI-isAI 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12758. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79942-7_8
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