Politeness and Suprasegmentals - a study on Japanese spontaneous speech

Mika Ito

In this talk, I'm going to report designs of experiments conducted in Japan this May. These experiments are conducted with an attempt to figure out ``Politeness", which was suggested by Brown and Levinson(1987), in spoken Japanese, apart from ``formality", which is expressed with honorific expressions. In a production test, more speakers of different social status but in a same social group were recruited. They successfully showed their formality using honorifics properly, according to their addressees. A perception test consists of two parts. The first part is a magnitude estimation of relatively neutral utterances in honorifics, with access to lexical information only, and subjects were asked to judge ``formality" of utterances with slight cues of honorific illocutions. The second part is force-choice experiment and the subjects are asked to listen utterances and judge if each utterance's addressee is a speaker's superior/inferior. The contrast of these two parts will show that lexical formality is still a way to show ``negative" politeness (in a sense that showing respect of speakers, not to offend addressees), however, a strategy to convey "positive politeness", acoustics is likely to take more important role.