jibun

[David Pesetsky]

Dear list,

I'm sorry to have caused so much commotion.  My original remark had  a
context:  a poster had noted that Nepali has a reflexive that can stand in
subject position, yet takes its antecedent within its own clause.   I
pointed out that the availability of a reflexive-like element in subject
position does indeed seem to be unrelated to the question of
discourse-level vs. sentence-internal antecedent.  My intent was to make
the same point as the previous poster, in a different way.  It was in that
context that I mentioned Japanese zibun-zisin.

To the extent that I hedged about the accuracy of the data in my own
message ("the bimorphemic zibun-zisin *is supposed to* differ from
zibun..."), it was not because I heard about it fifth-hand or because it
was a "formalist rumor".  My main source of knowledge about zibun-zisin
comes from a 1986 UMass dissertation by Yoshihisa Kitagawa ("Subject in
Japanese and English") for which I was the committee chair.  He, in turn,
was building on work by fellow student Kiyoshi Kurata.  Both are native
speakers of Japanese.  Both have done careful, constructive and interesting
work on a variety of topics.  I hedged about the accuracy of the data
simply because I have not kept up with the more recent literature on the
subject  and because I  was aware that the story, like most stories in
linguistics, was certainly more complex.

Indeed, there is at least one relevant paper that I should have remembered
(because it is by a former colleague) that takes up the issue of
zibun-zisin in its discourse context, and shows the story to be more
complex.  It is a 1994 paper by Takako Aikawa called "Logophoric Use of the
Japanese Reflexive zibun-zisin 'self-self'" in  -- dare I say it? --
"Formal Approaches to Japanese Linguistics I", a conference proceedings
volume available from MIT Working Papers in Linguistics. ( I believe that
her Ohio State dissertation also discussed zibun-zisin, but I cannot find
my copy at the moment.)    There is clearly other work on the topic by
other researchers that I was completely unaware of, from a variety of
perspectives.  Chris Manning has pointed out some of this work in his
messages to this list.  It is to learn such things that I subscribe to
lists like this one.

Most important, I apologize to Ken Safir, whose name has been dragged
through the mud for no apparent reason other than the fact that I called
his papers interesting.   I do think the work is interesting, and probably
related to the ongoing discussion, but if others disagree on factual or
conceptual grounds, that's fine and interesting too.

In any case, I wrote my message about zibun-zisin as a very casual, very
minor contribution to an interesting ongoing discussion, with the intention
of learning from the responses of other readers.  That is the spirit in
which my note should have been read.  So please, as a recent poster says,
back to the data.

-David Pesetsky