Polite language behavior: A comparison between learners and native speakers of Japanese

Noriko Asato, Purdue University

Abstract

Politeness is an integral element of the Japanese language, but it has not been fully explored from the perspective of universal politeness theories. The universal politeness theory proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987) views polite language as a communication strategy expressed by the indirectness of utterances. Some Japanese linguists, however, have resisted this viewpoint and regarded Japanese polite language as a unique system which is out of the compass of universal politeness phenomena (Ide, 1989; Matsumoto, 1989). This dissertation empirically examines Japanese polite language behavior in light of the universal theory. This will allow us to investigate what polite language is for Japanese speakers. Another purpose of this dissertation is to compare learners and native speakers in terms of their use of polite language. Mastering polite language is one of the most difficult aspects of Japanese for learners, and yet their actual use of polite language has seldom been studied. We have little information as to what specifically makes it difficult to learn. The subjects were 50 American advanced-level learners of Japanese in the United States and 50 Japanese university students in Japan. The responses were elicited by Discourse Completion Tasks (DCT), and a situational assessment questionnaire was implemented in order to examine their perceptions of the situations in the DCT items. The collected responses were evaluated by another 100 native speakers of Japanese in terms of honorifics and indirectness, as well as native reactions towards the responses. Results indicate that the native subjects indeed used indirectness as a politeness device. Different determinants for their use of indirectness from those for honorifics indicated that the Japanese subjects distinguished the two types of politeness devices depending on factors involved in the situations. Comparing the two groups, the learners differed from the natives in terms of the use of both honorifics and indirectness. For both honorifics and indirectness, the learners used different usage rules from those of the native speakers. Their perceptions of the situations were also different. The findings suggest that learners have various levels of difficulty related to the pragmatic knowledge of polite language use.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Fukada, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Language arts|Language|Higher education

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