The doubling of giving verbs in Japanese: Convergence and divergence on the implicit side

Abstract

Japanese has (at least) five giving verbs: ‘yaru,’ ‘ageru,’ ‘sashiageru,’ ‘kureru,’ and ‘kudasaru.’ These are inherently deictic, and divided in a cross-cutting fashion in terms of (i) the viewpoint from which the giving event is described and (ii) the social/psychological factors relating to the speaker, the hearer, and the event participants. The giving verbs can also be used as auxiliary verbs with the same two-way categorisation. In this article, we reveal the legitimate and illegitimate combinations of giving verbs in a main-verb-auxiliary cluster, and propose a functional-pragmatic account: the doubling of giving verbs is possible only when a conventional implicature encoded in the main verb is consistent with a conventional implicature encoded in the auxiliary verb. The proposed account is based on theory-neutral assumptions/mechanisms, and it can thus be integrated with previous analyses, with the consequence of broadening empirical coverage.