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Honorific predication in early middle Japanese: a critical survey with examples from the Ookagami

Shibata, Chihaya C.

Abstract Details

1997, Master of Arts, Ohio State University, East Asian Languages and Literatures.

Early Middle (Chuuko) Japanese literature reveals that much of the honorific expression system was grammaticalized by the middle of the Heian period (794-1185). This thesis is an attempt to investigate what evolutionary paths honorific expressions followed as they became what they were in the mid-Heian period and how they were actually used in a specific text of the mid-Heian period, Ookagami 'The Great Mirror' (c. 11th c.). The general framework for this study is the field of functional linguistics. While it makes use of much kokugogaku scholarship, it develops an account of honorifics that suggests some of its established assumptions regarding the honorific system should be reconsidered.

In Early Middle Japanese, subject-honorification (sonkei hyoogen 'honorific expression') in predication was expressed by the inflectional suffixes - (ra)ru and - (sa)su, honorific verbs such as ohasu, honorific auxiliary verbs such as tamahu, and certain combinations of these three, for example, - (sa)sE-tamahu.

While textual evidence for Old Japanese is rather limited in terms of genres, Early Middle Japanese seems to have had more marked honorific expressions that involved a sense of triple honorification in addition to double honorific expressions. When one looks at the diachronic changes of each lexical item for honorific use, the evidence suggests that creating more honorifically marked lexical items happens when originally marked items became so conventionalized that they represent less of a deliberate choice on the part of the speaker, thus becoming unmarked. In order to preserve the markedness of an expression, conventionalized lexical items are often augmented anew with less conventionalized, more marked lexical items, and once again these expressions come to function as marked forms. This is a natural and widely attested linguistic process in the course of grammaticalization, and the diachronic changes of honorific expressions from Old Japanese to Early Middle Japanese do not seem to be an exception to this cross-linguistic phenomenon. Honorific predication in the text of Ookagami is straightforward in nature and corresponds to the general description of honorific expressions in Early Middle Japanese which I present in Chapter One, notwithstanding the many examples of the more marked "triple honorification" which occur in Ookagami.

Charles Quinn (Advisor)
82 p.

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Shibata, C. C. (1997). Honorific predication in early middle Japanese: a critical survey with examples from the Ookagami [Master's thesis, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1116609758

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Shibata, Chihaya. Honorific predication in early middle Japanese: a critical survey with examples from the Ookagami. 1997. Ohio State University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1116609758.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Shibata, Chihaya. "Honorific predication in early middle Japanese: a critical survey with examples from the Ookagami." Master's thesis, Ohio State University, 1997. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1116609758

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)