A Study on the Personal Reference Terms of in “I am a cat”

In this study, we consider the personal reference terms in the novel “I am a cat.” The person-to-person pronouns of modern Japanese have different characteristics from that of European languages. This study is an attempt to look at how those difference have historically occurred. As a feature of this study, the self-styled first person, the symmetric second person, and the third person reference terms in “I am a cat” were divided into the text and the dialogue. In this novel, since the text is told from the point of view of the cat, it is necessary to distinguish it from the person-to-person expressions that are shown in the conversations between the human characters. Firstly, the pronoun of ‘wagahai’ was overwhelmingly used in the first person's text. Although it was not a common first-person pronoun in the 30s of the Meiji period, it was deliberately used as the cat's first-person pronoun, indicating the speaker's haughty and arrogant attitude. This shows the satire and humor of this work. On the other hand, in the dialogues, the first person pronouns that were widely used were in the order of ‘boku, watashi, and ore’. Also, the first person pronouns of the male speaker were used in a variety of ways (‘washi, atashi’, etc.). ‘Syogun’ was also used in the second person's text. In common novels, second-person pronouns are rarely used in text, but in this novel, they are used in situations where the cat talks directly to the readers. In dialogues general nouns such as ‘sensei’ (teacher) and ‘okusan’(Mrs.) were often used in the second person, and in many cases, suffixes (‘san, kun, shi, ko’ etc.) were also used, in addition to the person-to-person pronouns such as ‘kimi, anata, omae, ome-, ometti, kisama’ etc. Future tasks related to personal reference terms could also be identified. In the first person, it is necessary to clarify the distinction of ‘onore’ and ‘jishin, jiko, jibun’ which were newly introduced by translation. In the second person, it is necessary to take a closer look at the gender-based usage of ‘~san・~kun’. Finally, in the third person form, it is the future task that is used to identify the reasons why ‘kanozyo’ was not used (unlike ‘kare’).The causes and the settlement process of the expressions consisting of “demonstrative + woman” have also been used in large quantities. This study will focus on all of these refrence terms.