Japanese is one of the rare languages that exhibit syntactically conditioned honorifics that interact with other syntactic processes. This chapter concentrates on such phenomena, and the following three honorific processes of Japanese are taken up: Subject Honorification (SH), where the subject is a target of the speaker's respect; Non‐Subject Honorification (NSH), in which the respect is paid to a non‐subject (i.e. an object, an indirect object, or the possessor of a(n in)direct object); and Hearer Honorification (HH), whose target of respect is the hearer. Although they have often been discussed and analyzed individually as different processes, this chapter, in addition to a concise description of the characteristics of these honorific processes and a review of representative previous analyses, provides an analysis of all three processes in terms of syntactic agreement between the honorific marking on the predicate and the nominal (DP) that is a target of respect.
The following claims are particularly notable: (i) the locus of agreement is an honorific prefix (HP), which makes it possible to analyze not only verbal honorification but also nominal and adjective honorification basically as the same process. (ii) The case of multiple honorific marking of SH, involving the aspectual
–
such as
(te)i(ru)
‘progressive, perfective’ and
hazime(ru)
‘begin’ – is accounted for. (iii) NSH crucially involves Applicative Phrase (ApplP), which is equivalent to what takes place in the benefactive construction in Japanese, thereby capturing the phenomena observed in both constructions. The postulation of ApplP for NSH, furthermore, explains why the same HP on a predicate unambiguously agrees with a subject for SH, which does not involve ApplP, or a non‐subject for NSH. And (iv), by adopting the recent proposal that a matrix clause involves an extended clausal layer (e.g. a speech‐act layer), HH can be accounted for as a syntactic agreement process that involves this layer.
