Barbara Pizziconi

Re-examining politeness, face and the Japanese language,

Abstract Japanese scholarship on Linguistic Politeness has contributed to a polarised view of politeness systems, whereby some languages are considered to conform to a strongly agentivistic paradigm while others conform predominantly to the pressure of external social norms. Japanese has been presented as a typical example of the latter, which invalidates Brown and Levinsons claims of the universality of politeness strategies. This paper re-examines the evidence presented to support this position and reassesses the Japanese scholars’ contribution to the critique of the then predominant model of politeness. It argues that the principles regulating the use of honorific devices in Japanese are not substantially different from those of English, both being similarly strategic. On the other hand, it highlights crucial implications of the Japanese scholars’ work which were not explored exhaustively: the critique of the pervasiveness of negative strategies, the universal importance of considerations of appropriateness and the key role of positive strategies. The paper concludes that politeness (as ‘appropriateness’) is better observed, even in Japanese, in the polite stances constituted by strategic use of polite devices rather than in unmediated polite meanings conveyed by the plethora of dedicated honorifics.

Japanese vocabulary development in and beyond study abroad: the timing of the year abroad in a language degree curriculum

This article reports the results of a study of vocabulary development by learners of Japanese during a year abroad in Japan. The particular feature of this study is that it compares the performance of two cohorts, studying at the same UK university and in degrees in Japanese in which the period of study abroad (SA) is undertaken at different points of the degree – in Year 2 and Year 3 respectively. Their performance is compared at three points in time: before and after the period of SA, and one year after return. The group going to Japan at a lower proficiency level (i.e. SA in Year 2) appears to benefit more in terms of absolute gains, although the two groups appear to perform rather similarly when their potential gains (i.e. gains against the tests ceiling) are considered. The two groups’ gains in the year following the SA are considerably smaller than during the period abroad but are remarkably similar to each other; however, these gains take place at different instructional levels. The implications for the timing of periods of SA are discussed.

Teaching and learning (im)politeness

This collection on ‘Teaching’ and ‘Learning’ (Im)Politeness (the inverted quote marks will be explained at the end of this section) combines research from the field of politeness studies with research on language pedagogy and language learning. Our aim is to fill the unfortunate gap between these research traditions in an endeavor to enrich the outlook of both constituencies, and to further engender a useful dialogue between (im)politeness theorists, language teachers, and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) researchers.

The Interactional Consequences of Epistemic Indexicality — Some Thoughts on the Epistemic Marker -kamoshirenai

While the grammatical and semantic dimensions of modality have been studied extensively, only a few works have explored its role in actual communication and in social interactions. The amount of research from this perspective has been scarce in comparison to other approaches to modality and even scarcer in the field of Japanese modality. This chapter reviews and summarizes some important works carried out in disciplinary perspectives with an interest in discursive, functional and interactional aspects of language use, and tries to illustrate their arguments through Japanese data. The limited scope of this chapter aims mostly at testing our current understanding of the meaning and function of Japanese modal markers against actual instances of use, and at exploring the potential of qualitative analyses of conversation. The rather cursory discussion I present here is mainly a call for more extensive inquiry into the discursive functions of Japanese modal markers, in socially embedded contexts of use. Three decades ago van Dijk (1981:132) noted the profitless disciplinary segregation of cognitive psychology (which deals with knowledge and belief) and social psychology (which deals with opinions and attitudes). Indeed, with a few exceptions, the study of attitudes in the field of modality has addressed mostly the ‘psychological’ but not the ‘social’. Much more work is to be done regarding how the use of modal markers is constrained by sociocultural norms and practices.

Indexicality and (im)politeness

This chapter argues that frameworks that address the indexical properties of natural language provide a unified and coherent account of diverse phenomena that are crucial to the study of (Im)politeness. Studies of indexicality have typically explored deictic systems, of which honorifics are but a subset (‘social deixis’), but have also addressed the semiotic potential of linguistic resources. Indexicality can provide a paradigm that theorises the link between linguistic phenomena and typical concerns of (Im)politeness research (e.g. self- and other-evaluation and positioning, registers, or sociolinguistic variation). Additionally, this chapter argues that a socioculturally oriented indexical approach can be extended to account for the social currency of normative behaviours, the recognisability or (stereo)typification of social personae or identities, or the transmission and transformation of ideologies of language use.