Being polite and subordinate: Morphosyntax determines the embeddability of Utterance Honorifics in Japanese

Utterance Honorifics (UHs) are generally regarded as a main clause phenomenon they reflect the speaker’s attitude towards addressee/audience. UHs in Japanese present challenging problem to this view, however, it has been reported that can be embedded under some circumstances (Miyagawa 2012; Yamada 2019 and references therein). In paper, we closely examine embedding patterns of three UH markers Japanese, verbal UH, copula for noun, an adjective, show there considerable variations among markers. We argue their distributional differences intimately tied morphosyntactic characteristics interaction with tense finiteness specifications language. More specifically, propose is close, though possibly not perfect, correspondence between degree embeddability syntactic size constituents contain them. The proposed analysis couched within Porter et al’s (2019) which posits head, c°. It will demonstrated varying is, most part, consistent proposal c° is projected only at root level, but identify few exceptional cases radically ‘root-like’ clauses have own cPs. further suggest licensed via multiple Agree from matrix clause, makes marking kind concord phenomenon.