Japanese politeness situated in thanking a benefactor

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to show how grammar interacts with pragmatics and to determine whether situated pragmatic meanings can be explained by Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory. To address these issues, this study examines Japanese speakers’ use of four benefactive auxiliary verbs in thanking an addressee for a kind deed. The results of two questionnaires indicated that, in thanking usage, ?te kureru, ‘give’, was used to indicate intimacy, whereas ?te morau, ‘receive’, signalled a speaker’s concern for the addressee’s trouble. Honorific forms showed significantly greater psychological distance and heightened attentiveness to the addressee’s welfare. Analysis of these results shows how different, yet metaphorically inferable from grammatical/semantic meanings, the situated meanings are. In so doing, it illustrates that the pragmatic inference and semantic change in thanking usage are channelled by a social norm among Japanese speakers, namely that of attending to another’s welfare or trouble. In contrast, maintenance of positive face did not explain the use of any of the studied linguistic forms in the speech act of thanking. The usage appeared not to be mediated by face, suggesting that face and politeness do not necessarily conflate.