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

•New data are presented concerning the doubling of giving verbs in Japanese.•The speaker's viewpoint identification is captured as conventional implicature (CI).•A new form of functional-pragmatic account is proposed based on consistency of CIs.•Consistency of multiple CIs is examined in a range of verb-doubling data.•The proposed account is compatible with major approaches to semantics/pragmatics.

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.