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.