On the Morphological Restriction in the Japanese Subject Honorifics

Abstract

The purpose of this squib is to show that a certain instance of the morphological restriction between the honorific passive morpheme -rare and the potential morpheme -rare can be derived from the phonological principle, which is found in various languages. In recent years, it has been shown in the literature that some combinations, of syntactic constituents and morphemes are constrained by the phonological principle, often called as Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP). In this paper, I examine two forms of subject honorifics in Japanese : the subject honorific (SH) form o-V-ni naru, such as o-nomi-ni naru, and the honorific passive (HP) form, such as nom-are-ru, and demonstrate that the morphological restriction cannot be attributed to syntactic or semantic violations. Finally, I briefly observe the cooccurrence restriction between HP and the passive morpheme -rare. I show that the same morphological restriction can be seen, and thus the restriction can be captured by the phonological principle.