Abstract
This work develops a comprehensive and systematic analysis of the meanings of Japanese honorifics (honorific expressions), which contrast in terms of whom they “elevate” and “lower” to what extent, and discusses some essential discourse principles regulating their usage.
Thanks to Elin McCready, Osamu Sawada, and the reviewers and audience of LENLS 15 for valuable comments.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
Here and thereafter, expressions in small capitals refer to lexemes.
- 2.
The abbreviations in glosses are: Acc \(=\) accusative, Attr \(=\) attributive, Cl \(=\) classifier, Cop \(=\) copula, Dat \(=\) dative, DAux \(=\) discourse auxiliary, DP \(=\) discourse particle, Evid \(=\) evidential auxiliary, Ger \(=\) gerund, Inf \(=\) infinitive, Neg(Aux) \(=\) negation/negative auxiliary, Nom \(=\) nominative, Npfv \(=\) non-perfective auxiliary, Prs \(=\) present, Pst \(=\) past, Th \(=\) thematic wa (topic/ground marker).
- 3.
The appropriate usage of suffixes like san and titles used as “quasi-suffixes”, such as sensei ‘teacher’ and kyooju ‘professor’, has close correlation with honorification. However, with Kikuchi (1997), I will not consider them to be honorific expressions per se.
- 4.
A fuller account of honorification also needs to take into consideration the fact that different honorifics are compatible with different ranges of registers/styles. I put aside this matter in the current work.
References
Comrie, B.: Linguistic politeness axes: speaker-addressee, speaker-referent, speaker-bystander. Pragmatic Microfiche 1.7:A3, Department of Linguistics, University of Oxford (1976)
Hasegawa, Y.: Japanese: A Linguistic Introduction. Cambrdige University Press, Cambridge (2015)
Kikuchi, Y.: Keigo [Honorifics]. Kodansha, Tokyo (1997)
Kim, J.B., Sells, P.: Korean honorificaiton: a kind of expressive meaning. J. East Asian Linguist. 16, 303–336 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10831-007-9014-4
McCready, E.: Honorification and Social Meaning. Oxford University Press, Oxford (forthcoming)
Oishi, H.: Keigo [Honorifics]. Chikuma Shobo, Tokyo (1975)
Oshima, D.Y.: Perspectives in reported discourse. Ph.D. thesis, Stanford University, Stanford (2006)
Oshima, D.Y.: The meanings of perspectival verbs and their implications on the taxonomy of projective content/conventional implicature. Semant. Linguist. Theory (SALT) 26, 43–60 (2016)
Potts, C., Kawahara, S.: Japanese honorifics as emotive definite descriptions. Semant. Linguist. Theory (SALT) 14, 235–254 (2004)
Tonhauser, J., Beaver, D., Roberts, C., Simons, M.: Toward a taxonomy of projective content. Language 89, 66–109 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2013.0001
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Oshima, D.Y. (2019). The Logical Principles of Honorification and Dishonorification in Japanese. In: Kojima, K., Sakamoto, M., Mineshima, K., Satoh, K. (eds) New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. JSAI-isAI 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11717. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31605-1_24
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31605-1_24
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-31604-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-31605-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)