日本語の敬語表現はAgreementか？

概要

論文の詳細を見る
It is widely accepted that a certain type of honorific expressions in Japanese (which are often referred to as object honorifics) have to cooccur with an NP denoting 'a person socially superior to the speaker (an SSS)' in a non-subject position. Toribio 1990, Niinuma 2003, Hasegawa 2006, and Kishimoto 2007, among others, assume that the honorific expression in question must agree with the SSS in a non-subject position. In this study note, however, I show that the agreement analysis such as proposed in Niinuma 2003 is inadequate at least in the following two points. (i) There are many examples in which an SSS in a non-subject position cannot cooccur with object honorifics. (ii) There are examples in which an SSS does not syntactically appear in a object honorific construction. (i) goes against the prediction made by the agreement analysis, and (ii) shows that the agreement analysis is based on incorrect observations. It is thus concluded that object honorifics should not be analyzed in terms of syntactic agreement.