Subjectlessness and Honorifics : Text Construction of Japanese

要旨

Not many theoretical linguists doubt that the Japanese sentence is ambiguous Out of context; for they often begin discussion with sentences already furnished with subject and verb. But the commonest type of Japanese sentences in conversation has no subject at all. Therefore, it is often impossible who is the doer or the receiver of the act described by the verb if the sentence is viewed only in the light of Western linguistics which presupposes the existence of the subject. The only key to discern the subject is in the context and honorific element(s) scattered around in the sentence.However, there has been no clear statement in the literature so far about how this subjectlessphenomenon is related to honorific system in this language. Most discussions have been either on how to conjugate verb or aux forms (traditional Japanese scholars) or on how differently people speak to various people from politeness viewpoint (both Japanese and non-Japanese sociolinguists). This second approach is exactly what I have been taking for several years but now I believe Japanese honorifics and politeness in English sense cannot be discussed in the same domain. And this paper is one of the first steps to prove it.With this in mind, the paper will give several examples of texts, both with and without subject and show how it is misleading to interpret a single sentence per se without help from the context and from differentiated use of honorifics. Data will be taken mainly from the dictated dialogues collected by Hon and others. (Test analysis, subjectless contruction, honorifics, politeness, Japanese)

主題