「人」を指す名詞が1人称の人物を指す用法について

要旨

In spoken Japanese, previous studies have pointed out that in certain contexts, words meaning “person” refer to the speaker, i.e., the first person (hereafter, this phenomenon is referred to as the first person usage of “person” noun). This paper is largely divided into two parts. In the first part of this paper, I will show that this first person usage of “person” noun is widespread in various languages, including Altaic-type languages, and discuss how this phenomenon differs across languages. It is shown that there is a significant difference between these phenomena in Indo-European languages and those in Altaictype languages. I conclude that the first person usage of “person” noun in Altaic-type languages is valid in situations where the person is accusing the other person of something on the grounds of the socially accepted notion that one should not do something like that to another person. In the second part of this paper, I will analyze and discuss the factors that contribute to this phenomenon, especially in Altaic-type languages. Based on this discussion, I propose a hypothesis of oblique first person pronoun avoidance in Japanese. To test this hypothesis, I conduct a corpus and questionnaire survey. The questionnaire will also be administered to Korean and Mongolian, and the differences in the degree of dependent/head marking in the three languages will be examined. The results show that the hypothesis of oblique first person pronoun avoidance is true to some extent for Japanese, but that Korean and Mongolian show the feature of head marking-type more than Japanese.

主題