The historical development of person markers in Japanese: the roles of linguistic signs

This study is an attempt to explain the historical development of person markers in Japanese by means of Kellerian linguistic signs. It begins by assessing two recent papers by Heine and Song that use grammaticalisation theory as a tool to account for personal pronouns. Due to their rich semantic content, Japanese person markers belong to the open class and thus are not compatible with the concept of grammaticalisation. It will be demonstrated that three types of linguistic signs (symptomatic, iconic, and symbolic) and their use can shed light on the rise and development of Japanese person markers. The deployment of linguistic signs creates systematic pathways whose endpoint is the establishment of symbolic communication. The focus of the paper is to demonstrate how person markers concur with the mechanisms of linguistic signs and how social/interpersonal information is conveyed through this communicative activity.