論 文

From deference to solidarity: Linguistic reﬂectionsof Japanese social changes
1)

Yasumi Gee Murata

要旨

1980年代のバブル経済渦中あった日本は自己に対する自信に満ち溢れ，経済では最早アメリカ合衆国にも追い付いたと言われる状況にあった。日
本式経営方法を始めとしてさまざまな面で日本式を是とする考え方が主流となっていた。しかしその自信は1990年のバブル崩壊により崩れ去る。
その後の日本は急速に進むグローバリゼーションの中で，日本の伝統的経営方式とは異なる成果主義，能力主義を柱にして経済の立て直しを迫られることになった。政治，行政，教育と，社会のあらゆるところで効率を求めての改革が叫ばれるようになる。本論文では，このような社会変化が日本の人間関係の基盤である上下関係にどのような変化をもたらしたかを言語使用の観点から明らかにする。とくに，社会の変化に敏感だと思われる
若者世代の言葉に注目し，若者向けテレビ番組に現れた動詞の丁寧体と常体の量変化を見ることによってその変化を捉えようと試みた。結果は，年齢による上下意識は敬意表現として残っているものの，1980年代初頭と比較して1996年では常体のほうが丁寧体を上回り，使用量の逆転が観察されることが判った。これは日本社会が基盤としてきた上下関係が崩れ始
め，より横の関係に比重を置く，ポジティブポライトネス（相手との距離を縮めたいという欲求）への移行と解釈することが可能であるとする。
（キーワード：solidarity 親しみ deference 敬意 plain form 常体 polite form 丁寧体
language change ことばの変化 TV language テレビのことば
social change 社会の変化 positive politeness ポジティブポライトネス）― 17 ―

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Background
After rapid economic growth throughout the 1970ʼs, the 1980ʼs revealed Japan as an
economic super power with an ever stronger

threatening even to overtake the thenstaggering US economy. Economists, sociologists, political scientists and the like, bothoverseas and in Japan, made many attempts to analyze and identify the cause ofJapanʼs economic success (Kahn 1971; Vogel 1980; Sakakibara 1993, inter alia). Due to theeconomic success and the consequent attention Japan received worldwide, there wasan air of conﬁdence amongst the people. They felt assured that the Japanese way,
including traditional values such as group harmony and seniority, was as good if notbetter than other alternatives, notably those of U.S where strong leadership,
confrontation and meritocracy, all of which were nontraditional to the Japanese, prevailed.
The economic bubble burst suddenly in 1990 when shares started to fall rapidly.
Since then the Japanese economy has been in slow decline as evidenced by an everdecreasing GDP (Economic and Social Research Institute, Cabinet Oﬃce, Government of Japan
2003). The atmosphere in the country has changed drastically. As the awaited

economic recovery has been long coming, there has been increasing pressure forbusiness and other sectors to adapt to global standards meaning that companies had toplace greater value on eﬃciency and meritocracy instead of old business conventions
and seniority, in order to better compete in the world market (2000). Carlos Ghosn of Nissan Motor Corporation, after becoming COO in 1999 eliminatedhuge company deﬁcits and announced a proﬁt for the ﬁrst time in years in 2001 (Itagaki2001). He achieved this by restructuring the entire company radically such as by making

English mandatory as the language within the company. Ghosn has demonstrated clearly
that Japanese companies which adapt globally can achieve great success.
Pressure for globalization or to go ʻinternationalʼ has permeated into other parts ofthe society as well. Primary schools (the six years of education for children between
the ages of 7 to 12) for example, now have a course called[comprehensive studies] which under the one grand objective of teaching
children the active skill of problem solving, also proposes to enhance international
understanding in children (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology
2003). For

classes many schools have opted to teach English,

which in the former standard curriculum has not been introduced until junior high― 18 ―

From deference to solidarity: Linguistic reﬂections of Japanese social changes

school. Similarly, tertiary education, including colleges and universities, is also underpressure from the government to raise the standard of research and education to global
levels, meaning to veer away from the practices which have been customary in Japanbut are perhaps not beneﬁcial from the perspective of overall improvement ofinstitutions of higher learning. One example of this is provided by the employment
situation of university faculty members. Japanese nationals formerly received tenureautomatically upon assuming a university teaching position without any probational
period whatsoever, but tenureship can no longer be taken for granted. Although it stillholds to be true in most cases of faculty employment, there is now a trend towards
more ﬁxed term, contract-based employment.

Study purpose: assessing change in language use
Such tumultuous changes in society and attitudes towards more adopting global values
seem to be inﬂuencing the use of the Japanese language. In recent years the speech ofyoung people (those in their middle teens to early twenties) has attracted muchattention from the public for its seemingly strange characteristics. Their non-standard
intonation, accent patterns, and new vocabulary have sometimes been humorously
and/or sensationally depicted in magazines and newspapers. More serious treatment
has been accorded in the monthly journal dealing with language matters in nonacademic terms,, which ran a column on the young generationʼsvocabulary in 1991 and also in a book titled[Dictionary ofYoung Peopleʼs Vocabulary] published in 1993.
The most signiﬁcant characteristic of the youngʼs speech from a pragmatic orsociolinguistic viewpoint lies in their selection of verb forms. Young people appear to
be using less and less polite forms, the consequence of which is their speech often
sounds more casual than it ought to be to those in older generations.
Recent annual surveys on language use conducted by the Cultural Agency within
the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (1997, 1999 and2000) present statistics that strongly imply young people are becoming less sensitive tothe hierarchy of relationships and also to the notion of humbleness (placing oneself
lower than others), both of which underlie the traditional Japanese honoriﬁc speechsystem. For example, asked if they use the expression― 19 ―

(a

愛知大学

言語と文化

No. 11ﬁxed expression literally meaning “It is a boring thing” often said when one is giving a
gift to someone), only 21.4% of 16 ‒ 19 year-old males and 31.3% of 16 ‒ 19 year-old
females answered positively compared to over 50% of those of both sexes above 30
years of age ([1997 National survey on the use ofJapanese], p. 14.)

In this paper I will examine the extent to which casual speech is used in theJapanese of the young. There are two objectives for this investigation; ﬁrstly, toquantify the use of verb forms in the speech of the young and secondly, to ascertain
whether or not the use of verb forms has shown any change from the time before
compared with after the economic bubble burst.

Conversant relationship and Japanese verb formation
Japanese verb morphology is complex as verbs inﬂect for diﬀerent grammaticalcategories such as tense, voice and modality. Japanese verbs also have a rigid
morphological system that indicates the speech level deemed appropriate byinterlocutors at the time of speaking. Moeran, in the work that analyzed the Japanesethrough the language in modern popular culture, stated “As anyone who has tried tomaster Japanese will know, one of the more diﬃcult aspects of communication centres
on which of a variety of verbs and verb forms one should use when addressing or
referring to other people.” (1989: 6) Which verb form will be chosen depends
principally on the speakerʼs attitude towards the subject of the expression, which may
follow the established social convention of relative position/status, age and sex in thatorder (Nakane 1970: 32).
Bloch (1946), an American linguist who left a pioneering work on the Japanese
language, divides Japanese predicates into two states with one being polite and theother plain. He based this distinction on the use or non-use of

and

, the

honoriﬁc suﬃxes. A verb form with one of these suﬃxes makes the whole sentence
polite and more formal, which he calls ʻthe polite stateʼ and without it the sentence
becomes ʻthe plain stateʼ. Therefore two sentences having exactly the same
propositional content, may only diﬀer in ʻstylistic and social connotationsʼ (p. 163).
Martin (1964) and Miller (1964 and 1967) describe Japanese verb forms as being
determined by the relative status diﬀerences, i.e., deference, and also by the familiarity― 20 ―

From deference to solidarity: Linguistic reﬂections of Japanese social changesof the interlocutors. The two axes of deference and familiarity are evident in the verb
base and the verb ending respectively. Taking the verb baseit changes toʻto goʼ as an example,

to indicate deference to the undertaker of the action of going; inthis case it would be the subject of the sentence. The base may take an ending of-(i)- rendering two verb forms ofor. The ending ofis to show politeness and formality to the addressee rather than to the subject of theverb. The speaker politeness ending of, therefore is not used in conversations

amongst close friends and family members where familiarity and friendliness override
formality.
The bifurcation of verb forms according to who you are speaking about (i.e., thetopic or the subject of the sentence) and who you are speaking to (i.e., the addressee)
is very much in line with the traditional Japanese grammariansʼ analyses of verb forms.
Hori (1986: 376) designated a four-way system symbols of <+H> to the deferential base,<‒H> to the non-deferential base, and <+h> to the formal ending, <‒h> to the familiar
ending and tabulated the verb formation variants ofto show how the polite

morphemes manifest in the two axes of deference and formality.2) Table 1 is a much
simpliﬁed (and modiﬁed for some morphophonemic analysis) version of Horiʼs tableexhibiting verb form variants ofʻto goʼ.

A verb form that has at least one positive element, that is either <+H> or <+h>, andthose with both <+H> and <+h> may be considered as polite in Japanese. In this study
I will examine the production statistics of such polite verb forms in order to determine
the extent of change in the use of verb forms between the early 1980ʼs and the late1990ʼs in Japan.
Table 1.
Variants

Base stem< H, h>iku

ik-< H, +h>ikimasuik-<+H, h>irassharu

irasshar-<+H, +h>irasshaimasu

irasshar-EndingAuxiliary root

Inﬂectional suﬃx-u-(i)mas--u-u-(i)mas--u

Adapted from Hori (1986: 376)(
: The morpheme does not have semantic content, but is added as a phonological ﬁller, as
the Japanese language does not allow the two-consonant combination of /r/ followed by /m/ or/k/. The consonant /r/ in the base stem ofdrops in the realization.)― 21 ―

愛知大学

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SurveyI compared ﬁve TV talk shows, randomly selected, that are considered to appeal to ayoung audience of those in their late teens and twenties. TV talk shows were analyzed
for two reasons: Firstly, TV talk shows oﬀer good samples of natural speech as
participants do not rigidly follow a written script but are encouraged to speak
spontaneously. Secondly, as Bellʼs theory of referee design (1984: 191) describes, a TV
talk show as a form of mass communication has the characteristic of converging morewith its audience (i.e., those not physically present with the speaker, but thosewatching the show on TV) and therefore would reﬂect whatever the language trend
considered most appealing to the targeted audience. For the same reason NHK [(Japanese Broadcasting Corporation)] programs were avoided, since being
the sole public broadcasting network, the speech therein is typically conservative in its
resistance to the non-standard use of language, and as such are less likely to reﬂect themodern speech style of the young.
Approximately 15 minutes of each talk show segment were randomly recorded
and transcribed for the purpose of analyzing politeness. The verb forms that aresyntactically permissible for polite and plain variations were counted for each categoryof <+H, +h>, <+H, ‒ h>, < ‒ H, +h> (all considered to be polite), and < ‒ H, ‒ h> (notpolite).

All the shows were set in a TV studio. The 1981 show consisted of only two parties ofhosts and a guest, while all other four (1982 and 1996) consisted of three parties of host,
guest and a live studio audience. In all ﬁve shows both hosts and guests came from theJapanese entertainment world meaning they were either actors, comedians or singers.
In the 1996 shows the host and guests were standing next to each other behind a
podium and were facing the studio audience. In the 1981 and 1982 shows both hosts
and guests were seated on lounge chairs that were facing each other but the chairs
were arranged diagonally so that the faces of the hosts and guests appear unobstructedon camera.
The tone of the shows is light and all are full of laughter. The conversation topics
are often composed of humorous episodes in guestsʼ personal history or their recent― 22 ―

From deference to solidarity: Linguistic reﬂections of Japanese social changes

experiences; if not humorous, the hosts provided amusing comments. Some sample
conversations are partially quoted below to exemplify the atmosphere of the talkshows. (A Japanese transcription of the programs is available in complete form in Y.
Murata 2002.)
1982
guest: . . . auto ne, dou katatte iuto, nnn mada koru no nante souiu hanashi woshiteimasu, gakuya de, itsumo sou desu.
ʻ. . . when we meet (in the studio back room), we ask how each otherʼs neck is.
We all talk about how stiﬀ our necks are.ʼ
host: Hata, 20, 3, 4 no musume ga gakuya de au tabini “kata koruuu”
ʻYoung ladies around 20, 23, 24 saying “stiﬀ neck” every time they meet.”guest: So desu. (laughter)ʻThatʼs right. (laughter)ʼ
host: (laughter) Oban no serihu de gozaimasu ne.
ʻ(laughter) Itʼs an old womanʼs favorite phrase.ʼ
1996B(The guest, who is an actor and also owns a noodle shop, has brought a bowl of
noodles to the studio for the host to try. The conversation is taking place as the hosttries the noodles.)host: Kore nee, teeru nee. Konna okki no ga haitteru.

(The host lifts up the ox tail;ʻThis . . . , an ox tail . . . Look, itʼs a huge piece.ʼ

laughter of studio audience)

guest: Sugoi desho.
ʻReally big, isnʼt it?ʼhost: Kore ikura nan desu ka.
ʻHow much is this?ʼ

― 23 ―

愛知大学

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guest: Kore 1200 en, futatsu mo haitteru.
ʻThis is 1200 yen, you get as many as two pieces (of ox tail).ʼ
The ages and sexes of the show participants are given in Table 2. The 1981 and1982 programs were diﬀerent shows, but all 1996 programs were of the same show
recorded over three diﬀerent days. The data from 1981 and 1982 are restricted to thetwo shows due to availability of recorded programs at the time of analysis.
Table 2.
Host

Guest

1981

Two females : late 30ʼs

A male : 70ʼs

1982

A male : 30ʼs

A female : mid-20ʼs

1996A

A male : early 50ʼs

A female : early 20ʼs

1996B

A male : early 50ʼs

A male : early 50ʼs but slightly younger

1996C

A male : early 50ʼs

A male : mid-60ʼs

Data and discussion

There were a total of 1682 verb forms counted in the ﬁve talk shows. Table 3 presents
the distribution of these verb forms in the four categories of <+H, +h>, <+H, ‒h>, <‒H,+h> and < ‒ H, ‒ h>. It is noticeable that the ﬁgures for polite forms (subtotals in thetable) are signiﬁcantly higher than those for non-polite forms in 1981 and 1982, but
the pattern is reversed for two of the programs in 1996 (96A and 96B). 96C had morepolite forms (118) than non-polite forms (111), but the diﬀerence is still less than thepolite/plain ﬁgures for 1981 and 1982. More polite verb forms in 96C may be the resultof the age diﬀerence of the host and the guest, which as will be discussed later is aworking criteria for using polite verbs. Another factor was that the host and the guest
hardly knew each other̶a fact that can easily be inferred from the taped conversation.
Figure 1 shows the percentages of polite and non-polite forms used in the 1980ʼs
and in 1996, indicating the shift towards non-polite verb forms more clearly; the use ofpolite forms decreased to 40.6% in 1996 compared with 54.6% in the 1980ʼs.

― 24 ―

From deference to solidarity: Linguistic reﬂections of Japanese social changes

Table 3.
Verb Forms<+H, +h>
Polite

Plain

81

82

20 (8.1%)

27 (4.6%)

96A

96B

96C

9 (3.3%)8 (2.3%)2 (0.9%)<+H, ‒h>

14 (5.7%)

3 (0.5%)4 (1.5%)1 (0.3%)5 (2.2%)<‒H, +h>110 (44.7%)

280 (47.8%)

81 (29.7%)

124 (35.6%)

111 (48.5%)

Subtotal

144 (58.5%)

310 (52.9%)

94 (34.4%)

133 (38.2%)

118 (51.5%)<‒H, ‒h>102 (41.5%)276 (47.1%)

179 (65.6%)

215 (61.8%)

111 (48.5%)

246

586

273

348

229

Total
Figure 1.

Formality is a type of politeness which manifests in talk on specialized occasions suchas public speech, TV/radio news reading, university lecturing and also in talk between
two strangers (Mizutani and Mizutani 1987). It is marked in the verb ending by thepresence oforand in my analysis given the symbol <+h>.

Table 4 shows the frequency and the percentage of formal <+h> and informal<‒h>verb forms in each show. Here we can see that talk shows of the 1980ʼs are very
similar in terms of the use of formal verb forms, 52.8% for 1981 and 52.4% for 1982.
In contrast the interlocutors in 1996 used less formal forms (33.0%, 37.9% and 49.3%),
but more casual forms (67.0%, 62.1% and 50.7%). It is clear from the statistics that
there is a deﬁnite increase of informal verb forms in 1996 shows in comparison withthose of the 1980ʼs.

― 25 ―

愛知大学

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82

96A

Table 4.
FormalInformal

<+h>
<‒h>

81

130 (52.8%)
116 (47.2%)

307 (52.4%)
279 (47.6%)

90 (33.0%)
183 (67.0%)

96B

132 (37.9%)
216 (62.1%)

96C

113 (49.3%)
116 (50.7%)

In the 1996C show, which had slightly more polite verb forms (118) than nonpolite (111) in the overview count in Table 3, the number of informal verb forms
actually slightly exceeded that of formal verb forms. This means that in the case of
1996C, it was the <+H> forms (i.e., honoriﬁc verbs) that boosted up the overall ﬁgureof polite verb forms. The host, not knowing the guest well who was also about ten
years older presumably used honoriﬁc verbs to show deference to the addressee.

In this section I will consider verb forms from the senior/junior perspective. This isnecessary in order to assess whether this traditional, culturally-bound parameter inJapanese society is undergoing any change. Senior/junior here refers to the relative age
diﬀerence between the interlocutors. Nakane (1970: 32) states that polite language is
employed by the speaker according to the criteria of status, age and sex in descendingorder of importance. This study examines the data by the age parameter, since the ﬁrst
criterion of status could not be validly established in a situation in which everybody inthe shows is from the entertainment world where there are no clear-cut rankings ofposition. In such circumstances the number of years one has worked as an entertainer,
which usually accords with oneʼs age, would be the distinguishing factor for producing
polite language.
Table 5 shows the actual numbers of polite forms used by each individual in the
talk shows and tabulates them along senior/junior axes. Figure 2 shows the percentage
of polite verb forms in each participantʼs speech making comparison easier along thetwo axes. Figure 2 indicates that the percentages of polite forms used by juniors is
consistently higher than for their senior counterparts, which clearly signiﬁes thatjuniors always talked more politely to seniors than seniors talked to juniors both in the1980ʼs and in 1996 shows.
Another point to note from Figure 2 is the decrease in the use of polite forms by
seniors in 1996. Polite forms composed more than half of seniorsʼ speech in 1981 and1982 (speciﬁcally 51.6% in 1981 and 50.4% in 1982), but every senior in 1996 used
― 26 ―

From deference to solidarity: Linguistic reﬂections of Japanese social changes

more plain forms than polite forms, as the polite form percentages of 20%, 35.9% and
45% indicate. This is consistent with the general decline in the usage of polite forms as
observed before, however, it also suggests that the decline is not restricted to young
peopleʼs speech alone. The decline in the use of polite forms by seniors is particularly
striking when we compare 1982 and 1996A. For both talk shows, there was a common
situation whereby a much older (and therefore senior) male host talked with a female
guest in her 20ʼs. The polite forms used by the 1982 senior male composed 50.3% of
his speech, whilst merely 20% of the senior maleʼs speech in 1996A was in polite forms.
Table 5.

81

SeniorJunior82 Senior
Junior
96A Senior
Junior96B Senior
Junior96C Senior
Junior+H, +h+H, ‒h‒H, +h

0
19
12
4
4
5
2
6
0
2

45
54
90
110
6
44
39
52
42
46

3
9
28
30
8
27
14
20
17
11

Polite Forms in
Individual Speech
48/93 (51.6%)
82/110 (74.5%)
130/258 (50.4%)
144/242 (59.5%)
18/90 (20.0%)
76/183 (41.5%)
55/153 (35.9%)
78/195 (40.0%)
59/131 (45.0%)
59/98 (60.2%)(: The number of polite verb forms for 1981 and 1982 shows in Table 5 does notcorrespond to that in Table 3. This is because in Table 5, the polite forms used in the hostʼsintroductory monologue are excluded from calculation in an attempt to obtain a moreaccurate picture of the nature of polite forms in the senior/junior relationship.)Figure 2.

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In 1996B where the diﬀerence in age between the host and the guest is minimal,
the percentages of polite forms resulted in similar ﬁgures at 35.9% and 40%, with both
below 50%.
The above ﬁndings demonstrate that Japanese people are generally still very
sensitive, consciously or unconsciously, to age diﬀerences when talking to others
despite the decreasing use of polite forms in general.

As explained earlier I use the term honoriﬁcs to refer to the verb stem that changes
according to the deference given to the subject of the verb. Unless one talks about athird party, the subject of the verb usually coincides with the addressee or addresser.
Honoriﬁcs in Japanese are reﬂected in main verbs for which the stems are changed
either to raise the actor (other than oneself) or to lower the actor (oneself). By using
honoriﬁcs the relative position of oneself and others is ﬁxed with oneself always being
lower than others. Most honoriﬁc verbs (including humble forms) are produced byattaching the preﬁx

and suﬃx(in the case of humble form the suﬃx is)

to the verb stem. Some verbs change to an entirely diﬀerent word for its honoriﬁc form
such asʻto goʼ which becomes, although such verbs are few. It must be

noted that some standard greetings or expressions contain honoriﬁcs such as
ʻyou are welcomeʼ, a reply to “thank you”, orʻI am tohumbly receive this foodʼ, a ﬁxed phrase Japanese people habitually say before eating.
I distinguish such honoriﬁcs as ﬁxed honoriﬁcs which are unlike regular or productive
honoriﬁcs for which speakers are required to know the rules for changing the verb
forms.
All the (ﬁxed and non-ﬁxed/productive) honoriﬁc verbs were counted and theirpercentages in each participantʼs speech are listed in Table 6. Due to the nature ofhonoriﬁcs only those produced by junior speakers are considered here. The speech of
the junior person in 1996B was not included as the age diﬀerence between theinterlocutors is minimal and thus honoriﬁcs are not likely to be employed.
Table 6 shows that with the exception of 1981, the use of honoriﬁcs is not so
prevalent in these talk shows. Particularly noteworthy is the fact that in 1982 and1996A, almost all honoriﬁcs were ﬁxed honoriﬁcs and the use of productive honoriﬁcs
was negligible at 0.7% and 0.1% respectively. The fact that productive honoriﬁcs were

― 28 ―

From deference to solidarity: Linguistic reﬂections of Japanese social changes

hardly used by the juniors in the two talk shows may well have something to do theage of the juniors, as the juniors in both shows were in their early twenties. Taking into
account that the junior speakers in 1981 were in their late thirties and in 1996C was aman in his early ﬁfties, it is possible to interpret the ﬁndings as support for the viewthat honoriﬁcs in Japanese are learned at a much later age than oneʼs early to midtwenties. Inoue (1999) argues that the complex Japanese system of honoriﬁcs isacquired not as much in school as it is in the course of working.
Table 6.
81

82

96A

96C

All honoriﬁcs

66.4%

47.1%

26.8%

49.0%

Productive honoriﬁcs

33.7%

0.7%

0.1%

10.2%

As far as any chronological trend in the use of honoriﬁcs from the 1980ʼs to 1990ʼs
is concerned, it is diﬃcult to make any conclusive statement about any change in useof honoriﬁcs over the period, as there is no consistent decrease of honoriﬁcs
detectable in the ratios of 66.4%, 47.1%, 26.8% and 49% for each show respectively.
The only signiﬁcant diﬀerence between the 1980ʼs and 1990ʼs shows noticeable fromthe table seems to be the decrease in productive honoriﬁcs from 33.7% in 1981 to
10.2% in 1996C. Here, however, one could argue that the gender factor may also be atwork as the 96C junior was male whilst those in 1981 were female. We need to
examine more data to draw any ﬁrmer conclusion in terms of honoriﬁc use inJapanese. From the current data one could only surmise that productive honoriﬁcs
seem to be used less frequently than previously.

Conclusion
The impression that the speech one encounters watching Japanese television in recent
times sounds more casual than before was quantitatively veriﬁed in this study. Within
the limitations of the data presented, the speakers in the more recent 1996 shows
clearly favored the use of non-polite forms more than polite forms. Change in the useof verb forms however, was not found in the speech of the young only. In the
programs studied, out of ﬁve people aged over thirty years, four used more non-polite― 29 ―

愛知大学

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forms than polite forms in 1996 compared to 1981 and 1982 when all such people (aswell as the one under 30 years of age) used more polite forms (Table 5). K. Murata (2000)
surveyed the speech characteristics of TV commercials appearing in 1999 that were
obviously targeted at the young (in their 20ʼs) and compared them with thecommercials targeted at older age audiences. She found that commercials for products
targeting young people contained only plain forms, i.e., informal verb endings.
It is apparent much of the mass media language that is aimed at young people inJapan now shows a preference for positive politeness strategies of speaking whichfunction to shorten the distance between interlocutors (Brown and Levinson 1987). The
comparison of formal and informal (casual) endings of verbs used in the talk shows
conﬁrmed this preference; the formal verb endings, once dominant in early 1980ʼs,
were found to be overtaken by the casual/familiar endings in 1996 (Table 4). Mizutani& Mizutani (1987: 4) explain that “. . . one uses the polite form [meaning the formal
endings ofand] when speaking to the general public. [Therefore] A

television or radio announcer always uses the polite form . . .” Although once true, thisrule did not always hold true in 1996, at least for the TV programs for the younger
generation. The young wish to avoid creating distance between themselves and theaddressee, which the polite or honoriﬁc forms of verbs necessarily entail.
The seemingly reduced use of honoriﬁcs in 1996 may be the result of thissolidarity-seeking way of interaction (Table 6), as the non-use of productive honoriﬁcs
could logically be explained if it is considered as part of solidarity-seeking behavior.
Fixed honoriﬁcs were relatively frequent in 1996, however, because they were ﬁxed
and as such have lost their original meaning, they cannot be considered as being
honoriﬁc for the purpose of this study. Such expressions have become lexicalized items
such as when one uses “How do you do?” in English; nobody really considers theoriginal meaning of the sentence.
A comment by a seventeen-year-old female in a magazine article whichinvestigated the speech of

ʻhigh school girlsʼ ([Women Seven]1999:

191) clearly illustrates this trend away from polite speech. Asked about her casual wayof speaking, she rationalizes that she uses casual speech with those she wants to makefriends with, but that she would create a metaphoric wall by using polite verbs withthose she does not care about.
The traditional value of seniority in age still remains as an important working― 30 ―

From deference to solidarity: Linguistic reﬂections of Japanese social changes

principle for Japanese interaction. The value underlying seniority however, isincompatible with the value that encourages a more egalitarian style of speech, andtherefore it may be said that we are currently witnessing a clash of opposing
philosophies regarding the use of Japanese language. Older people know when to
speak casually or politely according to traditional criteria, whereas the younger
generation appears to be caught between the desire that drives them to speak in afriendlier manner by using plain forms and traditional culture-bound intuition that
otherwise pushes them to speak more politely.
These forces are most likely to originate from the changes that the Japanesesociety has been undergoing. The 1990ʼs in Japan could indeed be characterized byconstant collisions between old and new values. The language change as seen in thispaper is a reﬂection of the unequivocal changes in Japanese society itself; if not areﬂection, one could still not deny the reality that the society has changed so far as toallow or accept such an nontraditional way of speaking in a public domain of the mass
media.

Notes
１) The research contained in this paper was originally initiated in research undertaken for the
Politeness Study Group in The Japan Association of College English Teachers. The results were
presented at 12th World Congress of Applied Linguistics, AILA ʼ99 Tokyo.
２) Linguists use diﬀerent terms for deference and formality morphemes. Bloch calls

honoriﬁc

while Morean calls it polite. I use ʻhonoriﬁcʼ to refer to base morphemes and ʻformalʼ to ending
morphemes and reserve the term ʻpoliteʼ as the general term for any verb forms that have either
honoriﬁc or formal elements, or both.

Appendix: Details of surveyed TV talk show programs
1981[Mie and Ryokoʼs chatter thief] Tokyo: Tokyo Television
Network.

1982[Sanshiʼs interview with a beauty] Tokyo: Fuji Television
Network.

1996 (A, B and C)[Tamoriʼs laughing friend] Tokyo: Fuji Television

Network.

― 31 ―

愛知大学

言語と文化

No. 11

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