Computational semantics and pragmatics of honorification and particles in Asian languages

2018 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 16K02640
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Linguistics
• Research Institution: Aoyama Gakuin University
• Principal Investigator: MCCREADY Elin 青山学院大学, 文学部, 教授 (30433692)
• Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha): 戸次 大介 お茶の水女子大学, 基幹研究院, 准教授 (90431783)
• Research Collaborator: Tawilapakul Upsorn ; Pittayaporn Pittayawat
• Project Period (FY): 2016-04-01 – 2019-03-31
• Keywords: 言語学 / 語用論 / 意味論 / 敬語 / 終助詞

Outline of Final Research Achievements

This project has focused on social meaning and the ways in which it is expressed by honorification and discourse particles in Japanese and Thai, as well as in the function of slurs, dogwhistles and gender marking in these languages and English. Because this research makes use of mathematical techniques such as logic and game theory, it can form the foundation of a computationally implementable theory of social meaning for applications such as machine translation and the classification of hate speech. The results of the research will appear in the form of a book to be published in the summer of 2019 from Oxford University Press; they have also been disseminated via a number of academic publications and talks at conferences and universities, both submitted and invited.

Free Research Field

言語学

Academic Significance and Societal Importance of the Research Achievements

This project has clarified the role of honorification and other aspects of social meaning within semantics and pragmatics, and has developed a set of formal tools for analyzing them. This is both important for academic purposes and for understanding how language functions to influence social facts.