published_or_final_version / Language Studies / Master / Master of Philosophy

Japanese honorifics (JH) are challenging for learners of Japanese language to acquire due to their complex grammatical formulas. Textbooks tend to assume that the explanation of grammatical rules and drill exercises focusing on the rules are sufficient for learners to be competent in JH. However, functional issues related to honorifics such as how to use honorifics in socioculturally appropriate ways or how to deal with non-linguistic aspects of honorifics are likely to be ignored. The present study questioned the assumptions entailed in the traditional formoriented approach to teaching language, and examined an oral interview activity carried out by 24 students in a Japanese language course at a Canadian university. In this activity, the students interviewed Japanese professors using JH, and several types of data (i.e., the researcher observations and interviews with the participants and student written reflections on the interviews) were analyzed in order to find out students' practice (i.e., what students did) of and theory (i.e., how students perceived) about JH and oral interviews. The findings of the study present a very complex picture of students' practice and theory; they were engaged not only in the formation of the rules of JH but also in the functional areas such as non-verbal behaviour and conversation management. The data also revealed that students were very much concerned with functional areas during the interviews. From these findings, the study emphasizes the importance offunctions embedded in JH, and suggests that the Japanese teacher help learners acquire the functional competence dealing with JH as well as the linguistic competence.

This thesis discusses Internally Headed Constructions in Japanese, specifically, the "Counter-Equi NP" (CENP) construction and the "Internally Headed Relative Clause" (MC) construction. In both of these constructions, an NP within the embedded clause is interpreted as an argument of the matrix clause. / There are two major goals in this thesis. The first goal is to provide a unified syntactic and semantic analysis of the CENP and IHRC constructions. I argue that the CENP construction is basically the same as the IHRC construction, even though some previous researchers have assumed the contrary (Kuroda 1992, 1999, Ohara 1996, Shimoyama 1999, among others). Furthermore, I argue that both the CENP NP and the MC NP are arguments of the matrix verbs. / The second goal is to closely examine the syntactic and semantic properties of the CENP construction and the IHRC construction. As discussed by Hoshi (1995) and Shimoyama (1999), the interpretation of the argument which is "modified by the IHRC" in these constructions is quite similar to that of E-type pronouns (Evans 1977a,b; 1980). In addition, there are some facts that show that the event of the embedded clause is linguistically connected to the event of the matrix clause. Regarding all these properties, the CENP construction behaves in the same manner as the IHRC construction. In this thesis, adapting the E-type pronoun analyses of the IHRC (Hoshi 1995 and Shimoyama 1999), I propose an alternative analysis of the CENP construction and the IHRC construction to capture those properties. / Moreover, even though the CENP construction and the IHRC construction share many properties with each other, there are some differences between them (Shimoyama 1999, among others). In particular, the CENP cannot appear as the subject of the matrix clause, whereas the IHRC can. However, we observe restrictions on possible internal heads with regard to the subject IHRC, in contrast to the CENP. This thesis tries to account for those differences under a unified analysis of the CENP construction and the IHRC construction, together with an analysis of the subject MC, which adapts Shimoyama's (1999) analysis of the IHRC.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1993. / Microfiche. / 2 v. (xix, 558 leaves), bound 29 cm

Typescript. / Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1976. / Bibliography: leaves [372]-378. / Microfiche. / xiii, 378 leaves

Thesis--Ruhr-Universität Bochum, 1976. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 239-249).

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Teachers College, Columbia University, 1991. / Includes tables. Typescript; issued also on microfilm. Sponsor: Clifford A. Hill. Dissertation Committee: Jo Anne Kleifgen. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 212-222).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 2008. / Title from title page screen (viewed on Sept. 22, 2009). Thesis advisor: Patricia Davis-Wiley. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 368-376).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 237-257).