Inanimate antecedents of the Japanese reflexive zibun
Experimental and corpus evidence
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10295345 |
|---|---|
| Authors | D Sperlich (0000-0003-3165-0869, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, corresponding author), Tetsuya Kogusuri (The University of Osaka) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 62 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 323-347 |
| Publication date | 2024-03-25 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Linguistics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0024-3949 • E-ISSN: 1613-396X |
| Publisher | Walter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE) |
| DOI | 10.1515/ling-2021-0033 |
| OpenAlex | W4389986534 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 26 |
This research sets out to challenge a conventional wisdom in Japanese linguistics, that the reflexive pronoun zibun is unable to take an inanimate antecedent. Through careful presentation of the data, including corpus sources, it is unequivocally demonstrated that the reflexive use of zibun can indeed overcome the animacy constraint and be anteceded by an inanimate antecedent, without any personification present. This has specific theoretical consequences in the sense of providing a theoretical simplification behind reflexivity modeling in Japanese. This is followed by a psycholinguistic experiment investigating how native Japanese speakers judge and process sentences with inanimate zibun . The key factors tested are the animacy of the antecedent, and also if the type of sentence, episodic versus generic, will affect the acceptability of inanimate zibun . Results from the experiment show that native speakers indeed do find inanimate zibun acceptable, and appear to process it slightly slower than the animate counterpart. The episodic versus generic distinction does not play a role in either the judgment or processing. Combining the corpus and experimental data anchors the phenomenon firmly. Finally, our attention turns to how to account for inanimate zibun theoretically, where we draw information from how zibun can already take inanimate antecedents if they are construed as agentive, or if zibun is used as an adverbial reflexive, showing that in fact, inanimate zibun does not require additional theoretical treatment – leading to a reformulation of Kuno’s animacy constraint
Animacy · Antecedent (behavioral psychology) · Cognitive psychology · Constraint (computer-aided design) · Linguistics · Reflexivity · Sentence · Sociology · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
Anaphora
A Grammatical Approach to Personification Allegory
The language of an inanimate narrator
Reflexive binding
Shifting animacy
Viewpoint and the nature of the Japanese reflexive zibun
Differential Object Marking
The Bound‐Variable Interpretation in Child Japanese
On-line and off-line reflexive resolution in Japanese logophoric sentences
Evidentiality, Experiencers, and the Syntax of sentience in Japanese
Incremental Processing of Coreference and Binding in Japanese
Syntactic direction and obviation as empathy-based phenomena
The Researcher Gave the Subject a Test about Himself
Semantic universals in classifier systems
Differential Agent Marking and animacy
Grammaticalization, lexicalization and intensification
The conceptual basis for reflexive constructions in Japanese
Public and private self as two aspects of the speaker
| Highly cited | No |
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