Parsing Japanese Honorifics in Unification-Based Grammar

PARSING JAPANESE HONORIFICS IN UNIFICATION-BASED GRAMMAR Hiroyuki MAEDA, Susumu KATO, Kiyoshi KOGURE and Hitoshi IIDA ATR Interpreting Telephony Research Laboratories Twin 21 Bldg. MID Tower, 2-1-61 Shiromi, Higashi-ku, Osaka 540, Japan Abstract This paper presents a unification-based approach to Japanese honorifics based on a version of HPSG (Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar)ll]121. Utterance parsing is based on lexical specifications of each lexical item, including honorifics, and a few general PSG rules using a parser capable of unifying cyclic feature structures. It is shown that the possible word orders of Japanese honorific predicate constituents can be automatically deduced in the proposed framework without independently specifying them. Discourse Information Change Rules (DICRs) that allow resolving a class of anaphors in honorific contexts are also formulated. 1. Introduction Japanese has a rich grammaticalized system of honorifics to express the speaker's honorific attitudes toward discourse agents (i.e. persons who are related to the discourse). As opposed to such written texts as scientific or newspaper articles, where the author's rather 'neutral' honorific attitude is required, in spoken dialogues, an abundant number of honorific expressions is used and plays an important role in resolving human zero-anaphors. In this paper, a unification-based approach to Japanese honorifics is proposed. First, Mizutani's theory of honorific expression actl3] is introduced to define basic honorific attitude types used in specifying pragmatic constraints on the use of Japanese honorifics. Then a range of honorifics are classified into subtypes from a morphological and syntactico- semantic perspective and examples of their lexical specifications are shown. The main characteristics of the utterance parser and an approach to explaining possible word orders of honorific predicate constituents are described. Finally, Discourse Information Change Rules are formulated that resolve a class of anaphors in honorific contexts. 2. Speaker's Honorific Attitudes toward Discourse Agents 2.1. Grammatical Aspects of Honorifics A distinction must be made between the speaker's honorific attitude as determined by the utterance situation (the social relationship between discourse agents, the atmosphere of the setting, etc), and the honorific attitude as expressed by special linguistic means independent of the • utterance situation. For example, by violating a usage principle for the determination of an honorific attitude (i.e. "one should not exalt oneself in front of others"), uses of an honorific expression about the speaker himself can function as a kind of joke. However, without the help of grammatical properties of honorifics independent of particular utterance situations, the violation of a usage principle itself could not be recognized at all, thus the expression could not function as a joke. Though the former situational determination of honorific attitude is an interesting subject matter for socio and psycho-linguistic researchers, the latter grammatical properties of hot~orifics are our concern here and what is described with lexical specifications for honorifics. 2.2. Mizutani's Theory of Honorific Expression Act Mizutani's theory of honorific expression act is introduced to define basic honorific attitude types that stipulate the pragmatic constraints on Japanese honorifics. In this model, discourse agents are positioned in an ~bstract two-dimenslonal honorific space (Fig. 1). …

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