Japanese honorification as nominalization: Taking [HON] out of honorifics

We claim that Japanese honorification involves no dedicated grammatical apparatus, contra longstanding analytical tradition. Examining the components of two productive honorification strategies, we show that these components lack honorific meaning in isolation, but are nominal in nature. We therefore suggest that Japanese honorifics are built from general nominalisation processes and light verb constructions. We also recharacterize ‘honorific suppletives’ as semantically bleached verbal substitutions, showing that their distribution conforms to a general morphophonological constraint of Japanese, which we call the monomoraic constraint. Crucially, this honorification-as-nominalization approach eschews ad hoc, honorification-specific grammatical machinery, advocating for a minimal and economical featural inventory.