Friday, March 9th: Tran Truong (UChicago)

Please join us for the last LVC meeting of the quarter, to take place this Friday, March 9th at 3:30 pm in Rosenwald 301. Our speaker will be Tran Truong. Details about his talk are below.

Hope to see you there!

Containment, suppletion, & interspeaker variation in Japanese honorifics
Tran Truong (UChicago)

Containment effects have been proposed by Bobaljik (2012) in the analysis of a number of pervasive patterns in comparative suppletion. For a non-suppletive adjective, such as dumb-dumber-dumbest, the root remains constant, instantiating an AAA pattern. For a suppletive adjective, such as bad-worse-worst, the comparative and superlative forms share a suppletive root, instantiating an ABB pattern. It emerges from extensive crosslinguistic analysis that *ABA patterns such as *good-better-goodest are either extremely rare or outright unattested, a generalisation explained by Bobaljik to result from a universal, abstract representation in which the comparative is contained by the superlative: [ [ [ A ] CMPR ] SPRL ].

*ABA patterns should be observable in other domains, and indeed recent work has found evidence of such in pronouns (Smith et al. 2016) and case (Caha 2008, inter multa alia). The proposed investigation shall analyse honorific suppletion in Japanese as also exhibiting the *ABA effect. Japanese verbs have a socially-neutral form as well as honorific (expressing the higher status of the referent) and humilific (expressing the lower status of the speaker) forms. In the regular case, they instantiate the AAA pattern: kiku/o-kiki-ni-naru/o-kiki-suru ‘to listen/to deign to listen/to humbly listen’. High-frequency verbs have suppletive honorific and humilific forms, instantiating ABC patterns (iku/irrassharu/mairu ‘to go/to deign to go/to humbly go’) as well as ABB patterns (shiru/go-zonji de aru/zonjiru ‘to know/to deign to know/to humbly know’). A primary goal of the study shall be to characterise (the highly complex and irregular) patterns of suppletion and syncretism in Japanese honorifics as in fact exhibiting surface *ABA, as well as describe ongoing linguistic change in which these suppletive forms are undergoing regularising reanalysis.

A secondary but no less major goal shall be to compare the merits of a Bobaljikian analysis of the *ABA effect in terms of universal, abstract structure (e.g., ‘the structure of the humilific contains the structure of the honorific’) to a system-external account in which historical considerations give rise to the suppletion facts. That is, a language can only grammaticalise humilific forms once it has already grammaticalised honorific forms–indeed, this appears to be a fairly robust implicational universal. This accretive grammaticalisation ‘naturally’ produces ‘parasitic suppletion’, without appealing to universal cartographic structure. In short, the study explores the possible heterogeneity of *ABA effects (a road that has been well trodden by, e.g., Caha 2017), and whether in fact all surface *ABA patterning by necessity predicts underlying containment.

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