Japanese honorifics as emotive definite descriptions

Harada (1976) identifies honorifics as one of “the salient features of the Japanese language” (p. 500) and provides an extensive overview of pressing syntactic issues surrounding this system. But he remains noncommittal about the semantic contribution of these morphemes; the question of what honorifics mean, what they contribute to a discourse, is left unanswered. The present paper offers an answer to this question, in the form of a set of composition rules and interpretation principles that, taken together, can properly distinguish honorific-free forms like (1a) from their honorific and antihonorific counterparts ((1b) and (1c)).