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The Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics of Japanese Addressee-Honorific Markers

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The Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics of Japanese Addressee-Honorific Markers THE SYNTAX, SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS OF JAPANESE ADDRESSEE-HONORIFIC MARKERS A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics By Akitaka Yamada, M.A. Washington, D.C., May 1, 2019 Copyright 2019 by Akitaka Yamada All Rights Reserved ii THE SYNTAX, SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS OF JAPANESE ADDRESSEE-HONORIFIC MARKERS Akitaka Yamada Thesis Advisor: Paul H. Portner, Ph.D. Abstract Despite the long tradition of studies on the Japanese honorific system, formal analyses of addressee-honorific markers have not been carried out until very recently. Although not explicitly claimed, it was more or less assumed that they were just extra ‘ornaments’ encoding politeness that piggy-back on the main body of the sentence. This study aims to demonstrate that such a naïve assump- tion fails to explain the complexity of this system. The syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of addressee-honorific markers all exhibit unexpected and intriguing behaviors that cannot be easily explained or predicted by extant theories. The main body of this dissertation consists of one chapter summarizing the basic facts about the Japanese honorific system and three chapters discussing issues in the domain of (morpho)syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. First, this study discusses the role of syntax in the Japanese addressee- honorific system and concludes that many of what have been regarded as syn- tactic properties are better understood to be morphological and/or pragmatic is- sues, reducing the role of syntax. The literature of the syntax-discourse interface has for the most part convincingly argued that discourse-oriented elements are distributed around/above CP (Speas and Tenny 2003; Haegeman and Hill 2013; Miyagawa 2012, 2017; Zu 2018). Nevertheless, the Japanese -mas is pronounced in a very low position far from the clause periphery. To account for the data, I adopt the framework of Distributed Morphology and argue that (i) an hon- orific feature is postsyntactically inserted by the morphology (sprouting) (Choi and Harley 2019; Oseki and Tagawa 2019) and (ii) that it has an agreement re- lation with the syntactically represented HEARER in the clause periphery. It is also known that addressee-honorific markers exhibit an interaction with sentence mood; i.e., they are necessary for response-seeking questions (Miyagawa 2017). iii Inheriting important insights from Dynamic Pragmatics, it is shown that this is much more easily explained in terms of pragmatic principles, rather than syntac- tic rules (Chapter 3). Second, the way addressee-honorific markers contribute to the context update is discussed. One dominant view in previous studies is the real-based approach, which assumes that there is a particular honorific range stored in the structured discourse context, and the context update is conceived of as a replacement for an old interval (e.g., $ Akitaka, [0.7, 0.9], P aul %) with a new interval proposed by, or in negotiation with, the sentence (e.g., $ Akitaka, [0.6, 0.9], P aul %) (Potts 2007b; cf., Potts and Kawahara 2004; McCready 2014, 2017, 2019). This dissertation demonstrates that such a simple replacement does not capture important properties of the context update regarding addressee-honorifics and, as an alternative, I propose a model in which the target of the update is a set of summary parameters that represent the past conversation. By integrating Bayesian statistics into Dynamic Pragmatics, we can characterize these summary parameters in many different ways. One can understand that discourse participants keep estimating each other person’s hidden honorific attitude. Alternatively, it is also possible to see them as representing the speaker’s publicized self-image (Chapter 4). Finally, this dissertation discusses why addressee-honorific markers are embedded in certain indirect speech contexts (cf., Alok and Baker 2018; Baker and Alok 2019; Alok 2019; Baker 2019; Kaur and Yamada 2019). Although we anticipate that discourse-oriented elements should be restricted to the main clause, Japanese addressee-honorific markers are often embedded in indirect speech contexts and, when embedded, special semantic and pragmatic effects emerge (the commitment effect and the enhancement effect). To account for these facts, I propose that speech act layers are embeddable. By elucidating the semantics of such functional projections, I argue that Speaker Projection (SpP) commits the speaker to the proposition expressed by the embedded clause (TP) and that the interpretable addressee-honorific feature from the embedded Addressee Projection (AddrP) enhances the politeness level of the sentence (Chapter 5). iv Acknowledgements This dissertation could never have been completed without the assistance and support of the following wonderful people. First and foremost, I thank my Ph.D. advisor, Paul H. Portner, for years of excellent advice, insight, and a wonderful farewell party! He has not only served as a researcher role model but has also showed us how to be a great father and be a sensible human being. If the world were a village of a hundred Pauls, many of the contemporary issues would com- pletely disappear (at the risk of making the semantics job market extremely com- petitive...!). I also thank the full committee (Ruth Kramer, Satoshi Tomioka and Amir Zeldes) for their thoughtful consideration and feedback. They have made me aware of a good balance between tradition and creativity, between a theoret- ical implication and an empirical coverage, and between theoretical linguistics and other fields in the academia. Various other faculty members at Georgetown have played key roles in the development of this work and/or in my professional development, and I highly appreciate their support: Ahmad Alqassas, Alison Biggs, Héctor Campos, Mark Meyer, Donna Lardiere, David Lightfoot, Hannah Sande, Natalie Schilling, and Elizabeth Zsiga. My Georgetown days would not have been this delightful without intensive discussions in the semantics reading group with Laura (Ryals) Bell, Austin Boldgett, Lucia Donatelli, Tris Faulkner, Jessica Kotfila, James Maguire, Bokyung Mun, Siyao Peng, Jacob Prange, Sasha Slone, and Yilun Zhu. I am also so grateful to warm encouragement and critical comments from the faculty members including Paul and two other fantastic researchers, namely Elena Herburger and Nathan Schneider. I am very thankful to my friends in Department of Linguistics and De- partment of Spanish and Portuguese. They were in my syntax and/or semantics classes asking challenging questions and making me a better teaching assistant; and sometimes in a hallway, in a student lounge or in a bar, having fun and talk- ing about our future. These experiences have made my Georgetown days so precious, so much so that I am so missing these five years. Many thanks go v to the above-named as well as Leah Adelson, Yuka Akiyama, Amani Aloufi, Hana Altalhi, Bertille Baron, Maya Barzilai, Gorka Basterretxea Santiso, Amelia Becker, Tyler Bergin, Meghan Birch, Chrissy Bistline-Bonilla, Ho Fai Cheng (Viggo), Hanwool Choe, Abel Cruz Flores, Keith Cunningham, Felipe De Jesus, Matthew J. Dearstyne, Meagan Y. Driver, Iván Andrés Espinosa Orozco, Lydia Felice, Didem Ikizoglu, Adrienne Isaac, Md. Jahurul Islam, Amy Kim, Kate- lyn MacDouglad, Jordan MacKenzie, Tim McCormick, Emma Manning, Todd H. McKay, Shannon Mooney, Jeong Mun, Naomee-Minh Nguyen, Madeleine Oakley, Bernard O’Connor, Annie Ornelles, Alexandra Pfiffner, Sean Simpson, Shoko Sasayama, Young-A Son, Sakol Suethanapornkul, Emma Tierney, Will Travers, Mariko Uno, Mark Visona, Jeremy Wegner, and Lindley Winchester. I owe what I am to people in the Department of East Asian Language and Cultures. I thank Kumi Sato, Motoko Omori and Yoshiko Mori for letting me teach intensive drill sessions, which were a very exciting teaching experience. Every class was full of eye-opening questions which I had never thought through by myself and which made me more and more aware of the complexity of my native language. Many students enthusiastically came to the Japanese Language Table where I could get their honest impressions and opinions of Georgetown students about the politics, the economics and the cultures of my country. Georgetown linguistics department also gave me a chance to be a mem- ber of organizing a conference, namely GURT 2019 (Linguistics and the Public Good). Engaged in this conference management, I learned how a conference is carried out. This conference would not have been successful without the leader- ship of Elizabeth Zsiga and an amazing team, namely Helen Dominic, Arianna Janoff, Jessica Kotfila, and Bradford Salen. I am so proud of our team effort and also appreciate the incredible amount of support received from Jennifer Brusstar, Yulkiana Delgado Gonzalez and Conor Sinclair. Outside of Georgetown, I would like to express my gratitude to the sum- mer camp of LSA institute in 2017 held at Kentucky University, especially Joan Bybee, Brian Dillon, Norvin Richards, Jon Sprouse and Coppe van Urk, for in- troducing not only many cutting edge skills/theories but also providing us with vi opportunities for interaction with many brilliant researchers, especially, Eunsun Jou, Young-Hoon Leo Kim, Akiko Kobayashi, Hitomi Minamida, Takashi Mino, Akari Ohba, Teigo Onishi, Masato Nakamura, Sarah Duong Phu, Sverre Staus- land, Tran Truong, and Danfeng Wu. I would also like to point out that many researchers kindly answered my
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