Yukio Hirose

Direct and indirect speech as quotations of public and private expression

Abstract This paper proposes a general hypothesis which can provide a principled explanation for syntactic and semantic characteristics of so-called direct and indirect speech, especially those in Japanese. The hypothesis is this: Direct speech is a quotation of ‘public expression’ and indirect speech is a quotation of ‘private expression’. The concepts of public and private expression designate two different levels of linguistic expression which correspond to two different functions of language. Public expression is the level of linguistic expression corresponding to the communicative function of language, whereas private expression is the level of linguistic expression corresponding to the noncommunicative, thought-expressing function of language. It is shown that this hypothesis, together with concepts called public and private self, gives a unified account of apparently complicated phenomena concerning reported speech in Japanese.

Public and private self as two aspects of the speaker: A contrastive study of Japanese and English

Abstract The speaker has two different aspects which can be called ‘public and private self’. The public self is the speaker as the subject of communicating (i.e. the speaker who faces an addressee or has one in mind), while the private self is the speaker as the subject of thinking (i.e. the speaker who has no addressee in mind). This paper proposes the following hypothesis about the public and private self in Japanese and English. Japanese has a special word for private self, zibun ‘self’, but not any special word for public self, so that in Japanese, various words are used to represent the public self, depending on who is talking to whom. By contrast, English has a special word for public self, I , but not any special word for private self, so that in English, personal pronouns are diverted to represent the private self, depending on the grammatical person associated with the private self in question. It is argued that this hypothesis captures such a fundamental difference between Japanese and English that it enables us to answer in a principled way a number of significant questions about marked differences between the two languages, such as why Japanese does not have a system of personal pronouns corresponding directly to that of English, why there is concord of person and tense in English indirect speech, but not in its Japanese counterpart, and so on.

Bound pronouns as n-bar proforms

Abstract Extending the idea proposed by Tsurusaki (1985) that anaphoric relations hold not only at the level of NP but also at the level of N-bar, this paper argues that, while pronouns such as he and she are NP-proforms when used referentially as in coreference, they are N-bar proforms when used as bound variables. The crucial argument for this position derives from the fact that in generic contexts like He who makes no mistakes makes nothing , the pronoun he does not refer to any specific person and exhibits the same syntactic behavior as the indefinite pronoun one , which has been treated in generative grammar as an N-bar proform. It is shown that the distributional parallelism and difference between he and one as N-bar bound proforms can be accounted for by assuming that they take null determiners whose functions are the same in requiring variable binding, but different with respect to anaphoricity and the type of operator required.