Japanese Honorifics and Situation Semantics

ABSTILACT A model of Japanese honorific expressions ill situation semantics is proposed. Situation semantics provides considerable power for analyzing the complicated structure of Japanese honorific expressions. The main feature of this model is a set of basic rules for context switching in honorific sentences. Mizutani~ theory of Japanese honorifics is presented and incorporated in the model which has been used to develope an experimental systom capable of analyzing honorific context. Stone features of this system are described. 1. In t roduc t ion Tile Japanese language, like Korean and many nonoEm'opean languages, contains a grmmnaticalized system of Ironer)tic forms. It is well known that the use of honor)ties is closely connected to context, inehating aspects like relatiw, social standing. No effective mechanisms have heen developed to deal with this problem. Situation Semantics (SS) IBarwise 1982,1984a,1984b,1985a, 1985b,1985c,1985d,1985ell Barwise & Perry 1983] [l,experaneeJ[Pollard 1985HCreary & Pollard] is a ttmory of context used here to construct a nmdel of honorific sentences to analyze the relationship tmtween sentence and context. About Japanese, we call make use of Mizutani's theory of honor)lies [Mizutani 1983a,1983b]. This theory dees tackle tire relation between context and sentence, but it seems that SS can describe context move usefldly than Mizutani's theory. In this palter, SS is used to reconstruct the context given by Mizutani's theory. Ilonorifie forms arc analyzed and basic rules flu' context switching are established. Table 1 gives the relation between Mizutani's theory of honorifles and the model. This model can be divided into two parts. The first part describes basic context features and the second describes lexical rules based on Mizutani's Jal)anese grammar, along with some basic mechanisms of "context switching."