Funknet

[John Myhill]

The issue is not one of knowing Japanese or not knowing Japanese. The issue
is looking for extrasentential (non-syntactic) factors motivating the use
of jibun. If one adopts a framework (e.g. P&P etc.) in which one by definition
does not even look for non-syntactic motivation, even if one is a native
speaker of Japanese, one is obviously not going to discover non-syntactic
motivation. It does not matter whether someone is 'up to date' on the
literature or not, unless more 'up to date' literature uses a different
methodology (which in the case of P&P it doesn't).

I did not think that it would be at all controversial on funknet to say that
an account which only considers syntactic factors (which is by definition
the case with any P&P account) is inadequate. Sorry if this is
'formalist-bashing', but here I guess I'm guilty of it.

On the other hand, I recognize that there is such a bewildering array of
published claims about jibun that it is pointless to refer to printed sources
as 'proving' one claim or another. If you want to really be sure of what's
going on, the only way is to learn Japanese and check it out for yourself;
I'm not being facetious here, that really is the only way to know. That's
why I originally suggested this possibility to David. Although David was
making claims about jibun, and although David has had graduate students
write dissertations on this topic, my suggestion that he learn enough
Japanese to actually see for himself were interpreted by some as being
rude--presumably, the idea is that the actual possibility of him doing this
is so remote and absurd that, by something resembling a Gricean maxim, I
must have been intending to insult him. On the contrary; my suggestion was
made in all seriousness.

As I mentioned before (my Feb. 15 message), there was a graduate student of
mine (Hisako Onuki) who wrote a term paper on jibun about 10 years ago,
using naturally occurring data, but she didn't even bother to show that the
use of jibun isn't controled by syntactic factors because in her database
(about 50 tokens) there wasn't a single token of jibun with an antecedent
in the same clause, not a single one where a syntactic account could
possibly work. I don't think I have a copy of the paper around any more,
but in any case she didn't even bother to argue against a syntactic
analysis of jibun because considering how it's actually used it would have
been beating a dead horse--it was so obviously controled by
viewpoint/discourse factors that there was no point in arguing about it.

I know I jumped on David for what seems to be a small point, to a posting
which he made relatively casually. But behind his thinking was a
presupposition which is much more significant: That discourse factors,
things which cannot be given a syntactic account, have no place in
scientific research. That the only acceptable methodology for researching
is intuitive judgments of isolated and out-of-context sentences. This
thinking underlies P&P and all of David's comments, as well as the research
he referred to. Only with such thinking, and such methodology, could formal
syntacticians have wasted 30 years of research on jibun trying to give it a
syntactic account. This is a very serious matter, going way past this
discussion of jibun. This is an extremely fundamental
distinction between formal and functional linguists (more categorical than
responsibility/irresponsibility about data).

John Myhill