Interpreting agreement: Evidence from Japanese object honorifics

Abstract

Agree is commonly considered to have no semantic effects (Chomsky 2000, 2001 a.o.). However, based on the behaviors of the Japanese object honorific (OH) construction, this work claims that Agree can affect interpretation in such a way that its result feeds a semantic predicate. This claim is based on two observations regarding OH. First, I examine a theoretically overlooked observation that OH is felicitous only when the object referent is honored by the subject referent as well as the speaker. I show that this observation suggests that the head responsible for the OH marking induces the interpretation that the subject and the speaker honor the object. Second, I examine the distribution of the honoree in OH and argue that the head responsible for OH marking accesses the object via Agree, in line with previous theoretical studies (Niinuma 2003; Boeckx & Niinuma 2004). I account for both observations by proposing that the honorific head serves as a semantic predicate honor, which finds its arguments via Agree.

Honorific (mis)matches in allocutive languages with a focus on Japanese

“…Japanese has an OH construction, which is used when the object refers to a person who is respected by the speaker (Niinuma 2003;Yamada 2019;Ikawa 2021;Ikawa & Yamada to appear). The sentence in (23a) is the plain, baseline example.…”

“…John-nom teacher-acc look for.oh-alloc.h-pst 'John looked for the teacher (honorific).' As shown by Ikawa (2021), the availability of OH also requires that not only the speaker but also the subject of the clause honor the individual denoted by the object. Thus, if the subject of the clause is superior to the object, OH cannot be used.…”

“…In the presence of a speaker and a subject that honor the referent denoted by the object, there are several structural requirements that must be met for OH to obtain (Boeckx & Niinuma 2004;Hasegawa 2017;Yamada 2019;Ikawa 2021;Ikawa 2022 a.o.). First, if the object pronoun is an adjunct and not an object argument of the verb, OH cannot take place even if the speaker and the subject honor the referent of the object.…”

“…We should note here that honorific allocutivity (-mas) is distinct from so-called content honorifics whereby the speaker encodes their respect for the referent of the subject or the object of the verb. We refer the reader to the previous literature for an extensive discussion of content-honorifics(Harada 1976;Kondo 1990;Kikuchi 1997;Shibatani 1998;Niinuma 2003;Hasegawa 2017;Yamada 2019;Ikawa & Yamada 2021;Ikawa 2021). …”