Japanese Honorifics as Emotive Definite Descriptions

By Christopher Potts, Shigeto Kawahara. 2004

109 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Harada ( 1 976) identifies honorifics as one of "the salient features of the Japanese language" (p. 500) and provides an extensive overview of pressing syntactic is­ sues surrounding this system. But he remains noncommittal about the semantic contribution of these morphemes; the question of what honorifics mean, what they contribute to a discourse, is left unanswered. The present paper offers an answer to this question, in the form of a set of composition rules and interpretation principles that, taken together, can properly distinguish honorific-free forms like ( 1 a) from their honorific and antihonorific counterparts (( lb) and ( l c)) .

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6a863bfccdd563fc565d0f50773fd6976da3a8f6