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Paper short abstract:

There are various plural personal expressions in Japanese, even though there are no grammatical marks of singular or plural form for nouns, each with their own unique nuance. Focusing on the word hitobito, we analyze the plurality of personal expressions and the speaker's subjectivity in them.

Paper long abstract:

　In many languages, plurality in personal expressions does not simply function as “more than one.” It can indicate speaker's subjective attitudes such as affection, respect, humility, and arrogance. Various plural personal expressions exist in Japanese, including watashitachi, wareware, watakushidomo, and others. Each has detailed usage restrictions and unique nuances. Hitobito is one of them, which expresses multiple people by repeating the word hito ʻpersonʼ. This word is considered the plural form of hito; however, the misuses can be confirmed in corpus by learners of Japanese as follows:

・When asked if the train was crowded: Mada anmari hitobito ga imasendeshita (There weren't many people yet).

・About a part-time job: Hitobito ni tabemono wo agerunogasukidesu（I like to give the food to people (customers)).

・Regarding New Year's events: Shinseki toka hitobito wa uchi ni kimasu（Relatives and people (friends and neighbors) come to my house).

　Why can we not get rid of the sense of incongruity even though they are all used as reference to ʻplural peopleʼ? How do Japanese speakers use this word? In this paper, through comparison with similar expressions such as hito, hitotachi, and ningen, we identify the characteristics of this word :　hitobito denotes an indefinite plural group of individuals, combined with the attribute of otherness, which excludes the speaker.

　The overuse and misuse by learners are caused by the highly versatile nature of plural expressions of persons in other languages as well as the fact that the reduplicated form hitobito is easy for learners to recognize, and the peculiar semantics of numbers in Japanese. The third factor is important from the contrastive linguistics viewpoint. In Japanese, with no grammatical marks for singular or plural, plural expressions have more value than plurality. In particular, personal expressions are related to the speaker's mental attitude toward the referent and perception of the situation.