Son, Young-Suk. 2013. Factors Influencing the Distribution of Japanese Plural Suffixes -tachi and -ra: A Study Employing the “Talk Show Multimedia Corpus”. Language Information . Volume 17. 47-72. This study examined which factors were significantly associated with Japanese speakers’ choice of the plural suffixes -tachi ( たち ) and -ra ( ら ), which resemble each other closely in meaning and are commonly seen in first-person plural pronouns such as watashi-tachi ( わたしたち ), watashi-ra ( わたしら ), boku-tachi ( ぼくたち ) and boku-ra ( ぼくら ), all meaning ‘we’. To do so, the study employed an intra- and extra-linguistic perspective based on the Talk Show Multimedia Corpus. The results revealed the following facts: The distribution of -tachi and -ra differed according to several intra-linguistic factors: the type of personal pronoun used with the suffix, the referents, and the content of the utterance, among others. Specifically, watashi and ore ( おれ ) ‘I’ are mainly used with -tachi , and boku ‘I’ with -ra . Further, -tachi is chosen when the referent of a personal pronouns includes all listeners, while -ra is frequently chosen when it does not. Finally, only -ra is used in honorific expressions, which in Japanese convey a meaning of downgrading of the speaker’s own status and that of people from their group or those with whom they are associated as compared to listeners. In the future, if the Multimedia Corpus can be improved to incorporate material other than that from television talk shows, it should be possible to comprehend the factors on the basis of which speakers select -tachi and -ra in colloquial Japanese, in more detail and from various perspectives, including speaker attributes that cannot be fully considered here because of the insufficient number of tokens.
Key words: suffixes, personal pronouns, perspective, honorific speech, corpus, verbal behavior