2015 Oxford x handout.pptx

honorifics An indexical approach to the study of
Japanese honorifics
• grammaticalised linguistic devices typically interpreted
as markers of deference to people of higher status or
large social distance, or as markers of the formality of
the setting.
barbara pizziconi
SOAS, university of london
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「こどものための敬語の本」　長田　2005
「こどものための敬語の本」　長田　2005
•  毎日の生活の中で友達や家族と話すときには、ふつうの言葉でいいかもしれな
いね。だけど、初めて会った人や、目上の人と話す時には、それではいけない。
ふつうに話した言葉はずいぶんらんぼうなものに聞こえてしまうんだ。「敬語」って
いうのは相手を尊敬すること。つまり、尊敬や感謝の心を表したていねいな言葉
を「敬語」というんだ。　•  in our daily speech with friends and family, it’s ok to use a simple language.
However, when we meet someone for the first time, or when we speak to
superiors, that’s not good enough. Simple language then ends up sounding
quite rough. Keigo means respecting others. In other words, what we call
keigo is the polite language which expresses an attitude of respect and
gratitude.
•  honorific (keigo) usage is supported by other semiotic behaviours which
are seen as isomorphic. > cross-modal iconism
•  this entails that any mismatches in the individual experience of semiotic
behaviours (and their social value) can give rise to different defaults in the
use of honorifics. > different valorization
•  honorifics usage is also supported by metapragmatic discourse >
metapragmatic comments enable social circulation of cultural values.
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honorifics-related terms in linguistic discourse
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honorifics-related terms in linguistic discourse
‘polite’, ‘formal’, ‘honorific’, ‘humble’,
丁寧語、丁重語、美化語、上品語、尊敬語、尊重語
‘respectful’, ‘deferential’, ‘derogatory’
vs.　普通語
ALSO:
teineigo, teichōgo ＝　addressee honorification
‘exalted’, ‘elegant’, ‘hyperpolite’, ‘semi-formal’
bikago, jōhingo ＝ indices of speaker demeanor
vs.
sonkeigo, sonchōgo = referent honorification
‘neutral’ or ‘plain’
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honorifics as deixis
deictic categories: isolate specific symbolic dimensions, anchored to the
speaker and the speech event, in relation to which other speakers or events
are placed; they are assumed to be coded in linguistic forms.
•  person, place, time
•  discourse and social deixis (Levinson 1983)
•  “The single most obvious way in which the relationship between language and
context is reflected in the structures of languages themselves is through the
phenomenon of deixis […] Essentially deixis concerns the ways in which languages
encode or grammaticalize features of the context or utterance or speech
event” (1983:54)
"Deixis" by Wesn - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Deixis.png#mediaviewer/File:Deixis.png
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non-honorific usage (addressee honorific)
X:
sociolinguistic approaches - gender
•  women are more likely to employ honorific forms than men (>because of
status/power differential)
O tōfu no omisoshiru ga sukoshi nokotte imasu yo.
tōfu soupFORMAL
•  younger female speakers of Japanese use less honorifics than older ones
to be leftFORMAL
(Endo 1999: 109–110)
there is still some tofu soup left (in your soup bowl).
Y:
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•  rather than (deterministically) by speaker sex, language use is driven by:
•  sociohistorically specific ideologies of social status or role-relationships
•  the speaker’s active construction of their ‘gendered’ identity
•  such creativity is possible based on recognition of stereotypes of use,
and strategic troping on such ‘norms’.
Iranai.
needNEG, PLAIN
(I) don’t want (it)
(Cook 1999: 92)
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two problems with conventional accounts 10
first person Japanese pronouns
A static understanding of the relation between social identity and language
use
•  misses the role of speaker agency, treating “a particular social category
as an independent variable”, rather than as a social identity
strategically construed by a “personalized” use of linguistic forms.
•  it misleadingly suggests a “direct mapping of a linguistic form to a
particular feature of the social context”, not possible with indexical
expressions (whose meaning is altered by co-textual or contextual
configurations to achieve interpretation).
Okamoto (1997:808)
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de-essentialising social indexicality
incongruous co-textual configuration
•  pronouns are parts of speech registers which form stereotypical models of
behavior held - though not necessarily uniformly subscribed to - by users,
who invoke such models, and creatively trope on them during
communicative acts, in order to generate both stereotypical meanings as
well as novel ones.
ore ga annai sasete itadakimasu
IINF
show aroundHUM-FORM
I’ll show you around
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incongruous contextual configuration
limits of pragmatic analyses (based on P, D)
•  (a father speaking to his son)
•  the meaning (effect) of any one element can only be appreciated on the
basis of overall co-textual or contextual configurations
•  meanings are subjectively mediated by ideologies
watakushi ga annai sasete itadakimasu
IFORM
•  social indexicality is not always deictic (e.g. indices of personhood) but
participates in knowledge of registers of use
show aroundCAUS BENHUM-FORM
I’ll show you around
> specific meanings (including deference or formality) should be seen as
emerging from specific configurations, and not necessarily relevant in other
contexts. 15
first person Japanese pronouns
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referent honorifics (suppletive forms)
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non-honorific usage (referent honorific)
controversial usage
When Kazue's older son, while sitting at the dinning table, asks her if there is
still cold tea in the refrigerator. Kazue (K) answers that there is, and tells him
to serve himself:
•  Nihon no kyūka wo otasuke shimasu.
selfDEF
JapanGEN vacationACC helpHUM-POL
‘(The Association of National Park Resort Villages) will help Japanese vacation.’
K: Go-jibun de o-tori-ni-natte itadakimasu. [laughs]
•  Kochira de omachi shite kudasai.
takeDEF BENHUM
here
(I) would request (you) to get it by yourself.
wait ?HUM/?POL-IMP
‘Please wait here.’
(Matsumoto 2008:98–99, glosses modified by bp)
Okushi (1997:187)
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honorific forms’ affordances
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limitations of conventional approaches
•  abstraction: neglect the very social environment which is necessary to feed
meaning to these forms and which these forms enable users to recreate,
dispute, or subvert;
•  variable valorization: neglect cultural and ideological considerations that
generate documented argumentative dissonances in the interpretation of
social meanings; •  coding: the associated assumption that that an a priory identifiable essential
meaning is inbuilt or encoded in linguistic forms, which overlooks the
constitutive role of co-textual or contextual factors in the specification of
such meanings.
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indexical view
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references
•  Agha, Asif. 2007. Language and social relations. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
•  combines instead an analysis of the linguistic properties of the class of
social deictics with a focus on the social context, understood as specific
socio-historical conditions, different value systems coexisting within society,
differential degrees of social and linguistic competence, and how all of
these dynamically confer content to deictic forms.
•  Brown, Penelope and Stephen Levinson. 1987 [1978]. Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
•  Deixis offers schema of interpretation, e.g. a schema of participants to the
speech event and to other events or referents locatable in relation to it, and
a schema of speaker stance
•  Levinson, Stephen (1983) Pragmatics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
•  (non-unique) indexical property: additional connotations regarding the user •  Okamoto, Shigeko. 1997. Social context, linguistic ideology, and indexical expressions in Japanese. Journal of Pragmatics 28. 795–817.
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•  Cook, Haruko Minegishi. 1999. Situational meanings of Japanese social deixis: The mixed use of the masu and plain forms. Journal of
Linguistic Anthropology 8. 87–110.
•  Dasher, Richard Byrd. 1995. Grammaticalization in the system of Japanese predicate honorifics. Ph.D. Stanford University
•  Fillmore, Charles J. 1975. Santa Cruz Lectures on Deixis 1971. Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club.
•  Inoue, Miyako. 1994. Gender and linguistic modernization: Historicizing Japanese women's language. In Mary Bucholtz, A.C. Liang, L.A.
Sutton and C. Hines (eds.), Cultural performances, 322–333. Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Women and Language Group
•  Martin, Samuel. 1964. Speech Levels in Japan and Korea’, in ed. Hymes, Dell, Language in Culture and Society, Harper and Row, New
York
•  Minami, Fujio. 1987. Keigo [Honorifics]. Tokyo: Iwanami
•  Pizziconi, Barbara. 2011. Japanese honorifics: the cultural specificity of a universal mechanism. In Sara Mills and Dániel Z. Kádár (eds.),
Politeness in East Asia - Theory and Practice, 45–70. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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