| Recent studies of politeness conducted by Western researchers have been oriented toward the construction of a universal theory primarily focusing on 'strategic language use,' while studies of traditional Japanese linguists have focused on the use of honorifics as grammatical features from 'normative view'. Both are limited in scope in dealing only with one aspect of pragmatic politeness. In contrast, the present study attempts to consider both strategic and normative language use, as well as the interaction between the two. It does so by introducing the concept of 'Discourse Politeness (DP)', defined as the dynamic whole of functions of elements in both linguistic forms and discourse-level phenomena.;Seventy-two Japanese dyadic conversations between new acquaintances, who vary in age and gender relationships, were analyzed with regard to the choice of linguistic forms and two discourse-level phenomena---speech-level shifts and the proportion of topic initiations, as well as the relationships between the two.;Five points about the present use of Japanese honorifics and the manipulation of discourse phenomena emerged. (1) The use of honorifics functions more as a stylistic choice for the speaker than as a reflection of the actual relationship with the interlocutor as traditionally explained. (2) Female subjects use significantly more honorifics than males. (3) Non-marked utterances without any linguistic politeness markers accounted for about 25--30% of the total number of utterances in each conversation, and took some role in DP. (4) Among the sentence-level behavior, only the use of the non-polite forms clearly reflects the age/power relationships between speakers. (5) All discourse behavior---downshifts, upshifts, and the proportion of topic initiations---clearly reflect the age/power relationships between speakers.;The findings clearly suggest that each element in discourse functions in a different way, but the dynamics of those functions constitute Discourse Politeness as a whole. These findings are discussed from the viewpoint of universal theory of politeness, emphasizing the need for politeness studies to incorporate the concept of Discourse Politeness. This will enable researchers to contrast politeness behavior in languages with and without honorifics within the same framework, and to construct a more comprehensive universal theory of politeness. |
