The rise of demonstrative-based first/second-person markers in the history of Japanese: A speaker subjectivity account
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1-1-2015
Abstract
This paper explores the rise of demonstrative-based person markers in the history of Japanese and takes Ishiyama's spatial semantic approach as its point of departure. Despite the claim that demonstrative-based person markers remained functionally demonstrative, I argue that they began to manifest the category of person from an early stage of their development; that is to say, thanks to speaker innovation, demonstratives underwent semantic re-analysis to become markers representing the speaker's ego in the reality of discourse. This paper also pinpoints that two notions, distancing and dissimilarity, are not spelled out in Ishiyama's framework. In conclusion, the substitution of the first-person marker for the second-person marker is analysed tentatively using Keller's theory of linguistic signs.
Keywords
Demonstrative-based person markers, Japanese, Linguistic signs, Speaker innovation and the category of person
Divisions
FLL
Publication Title
Journal of Historical Pragmatics
Volume
16
Issue
2
Publisher
John Benjamins Publishing