Mark Volpe: Honorifics, etc. (reply to Alec Marantz)

[Martha McGinnis]

Dear Prof. M. and DM-listers,
   Thanks for your comments. Certainly, there is
nothing that causes a particular problem for DM, other
than its not having a story on some very interesting
morphological phenomena. A 'story' would need to take
a position on the feature-types one might want to
introduce into a morpho-syntactic framework, e.g.,
+Subj Honor, +Perjor, +Dimin, etc., preferably
something much more imaginative. This, in my view, is
where the difficulty lies.
   In some ways, a parallel can be drawn with
syntactic "left dislocations" such as Focus and Topic.
Are features such as [+Topic] or [+Focus] part of a
constrained universal theory of morpho-syntax? There
are various viewpoints.
   Again, in agreement with what you say, Prof. M.,
there is a strongly syntactic aspect to Japanese
subject honorification, which a framework must be able
to handle. What I have in mind is the feature
agreement which seems to occur between subject-verb.
Additionally, there is a "de-agentivizing" process
which is reminiscent of Passivization, though without
changes in valence or case-marking morphology, e.g.,
'o-kaki-ni naru', lit. "become writing".
   One last point, for now, while the expression
"object honorification" ('kenjoo-go')is popular in
Japanese linguistics, I think it is better thought of
as "subject humbling". Partial motivation for my view
is the fact that the surface subjects are triggers for
"subject humbling" in unaccusative verbs of
inherently-directed motion, such as 'to go', e.g.,
'mairu'. Such an analysis could claim that all
Japanese Honorification involves subject-verb
agreement. Additionally, this is much less marked
cross-linguistically.(cf. Korean which has only
Subject-oriented honorification processes)
    If you or anyone have some comments on the
features which could be reasonably added to a
framework, I am all ears!
BTW, Are you just putting me on about Sells (95), the
LI article? In the unlikely event that you really
don't know it, I'll briefly summarize. Basically, all
morphology is attached in a Lexicon, the data is
exclusively from Korean and Japanese, and the specific
"morphological framework" he argues against is "the
mirror principle". He argues, if I recall rightly,
that because Korean has honorific DP-particles (also
allomorphy makes up a big part of his rejection of the
Mirror Princ.),  the mirror principle can not account
for the morpho-syntactic properties of
Japanese/Korean. His claim is that honorific particles
cannot occupy syntactic heads, contrary to what one
might argue for case-marking particles.
   For this reason, I've been thinking an account of
EDs is needed . Thanks for the time!

                Mark Volpe, Stony Brook









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