Honorifics as stylistic variables

Cyndi Dunn

Sun. 11-1:05 A

This paper investigates the use of addressee honorifics (morphological affixes indexing the speaker- addressee relationship) as a stylistic variable in Japanese. While there are many previous studies of social variation in honorific use, the majority rely on speakers' normative reports of their own usage and fail to reflect the variability of honorific use in actual speech. Studies of actual discourse, on the other hand, have focused on accounting for individual, micro-level switches between plain and polite forms, and have looked only at conversational data in a single situation. In this paper, I analyze addressee honorifics as a stylistic variable, showing how the overall frequency of polite forms varies across different contexts. My analysis is based on recordings of Japanese college students in two situations: a casual conversation at my house and a meeting of a college student speech club. I show that the frequency of honorific use is greater during the club meeting than in the casual conversation. The frequency of honorific use in the meeting situation varies depending on the activity in which speakers are engaged and their affective stance towards what they are saying. In particular, I show how two of the speakers shift towards a more informal style when their purpose shifts from objective reporting to emotional persuasion. I argue that a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis is necessary to identify and understand such strategic style-shifting.