Shibasaki Reijirou, Okinawa International University, Japan
Observations of personal pronouns with respect to person hierarchy: A frequency-based approach
This study explores the discourse-syntactic patterns of person forms in those languages that are raised questions about the grammatical category of personal pronouns such as Burmese, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, etc., and shows that there is a crucial basis for the existence of personal pronouns: forms for first and second person tend to exhibit a type of nominative-accusative distribution, while forms for third person tend to exhibit a type of ergative-absolutive distribution in discourse. Regardless of their lexical sources different from European languages e.g. regular nouns, the discourse-syntactic distributions of person forms in these languages are not unusual from a cross-linguistic perspective. My theoretical contribution is that usage shapes grammar and frequency gives evidence for the usage.
This study adopts a frequency-based approach to exhibit the grammatical distribution of personal pronouns mainly in Japanese, while referring to reports from discourse-syntactic surveys of other languages. My database covers the whole history of Japanese; I will thus probe deeper into several most frequently occurring Japanese person forms from each grammatical person. This pilot study reveals the fact that the grammatical distributions of those forms fit the person hierarchy across languages.
European languages have relatively clear sets of case declensions, especially in their pronominal paradigms, which display firm syntactic distributions e.g. I cannot be used as the object of a given transitive verb. Languages such as Dyirbal, Mopan, Abkhaz, etc. also consistently encode the distribution of arguments by their systematic morphological markings e.g. verbal affixes. As a result, a simple grammatical survey can reveal the grammatical distribution of personal pronouns in such languages.
However, Japanese has no one-to-one correspondence between grammatical roles and postpositional case markers, i.e. watashi ‘I’ can be used for both ‘I’ and ‘me’ without postpositional case markers. In addition, languages of the isolating type (e.g. Vietnamese and Chinese) have no morphological variation for case; in Vietnamese, tôi is used for both ‘I’ and ‘my’. For these languages, the token frequency of a given form is the only clue by which to clarify its grammatical distribution; otherwise, there is no basis for regarding these languages as exhibiting a nominative-accusative pattern, an ergative-absolutive pattern, etc.
While the distribution of Japanese person forms is limited (Shibatani 1990), quite a few works on the topic are found to have succeeded in language-specific contributions to cross-linguistic generalizations, especially from a socio-linguistic perspective. However, none seems to have addressed the development of personal pronouns from the perspective of argument roles; researchers have often paid attention to lexical expressions or zero-anaphora (Nariyama 2003). Therefore, this study sheds light on the definition of ‘personal pronoun’ in Japanese and other languages from a discourse-syntactic perspective.
Nariyama, Shigeko. 2003. Ellipsis and reference tracking in Japanese. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Shibatani, Masayoshi. 1990. The languages of Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
