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

Utterance Honorifics (UHs) are generally regarded as a main clause phenomenon as they reflect the speaker's attitude towards the addressee/audience. UHs in Japanese present a challenging problem to this view, however, as it has been reported that they can be embedded under some circumstances (Miyagawa 2012; Yamada 2019 and references therein). In this paper, we cioseiy examine the embedding patterns of the three UH markers in Japanese, the verbai UH, the UH copula for a noun, and the UH copula for an adjective, and show that there are considerable variations among the three UH markers. We argue that their distributional differences are intimately tied to their morphosyntactic characteristics and their interaction with the tense and finiteness specifications in the language. More specifically, we propose that there is a close, though possibly not perfect, correspondence between the degree of embeddability of the UH markers and the syntactic size of constituents that contain them. The proposed analysis is couched within Porter et ai's (2019) syntactic analysis of UHs which posits the UH head, c0. It wiii be demonstrated that the varying embeddability of the Japanese UH markers is, for the most part, consistent with Porter et ai's proposal that c0 is projected only at the root ievei, but we identify a few exceptionai cases in which some radicaiiy 'root-iike' embedded ciauses can have their own cPs. We further suggest that an embedded UH is iicensed via muitipie Agree from the matrix ciause, which makes the Japanese UH marking a kind of concord phenomenon.