Social context, linguistic ideology, and indexical expressions in Japanese

Abstract

Honorifics and sentence-final particles as indexical signs have been widely studied in Japanese pragmatics and sociolinguistics. Most previous studies have directly related linguistic forms to aspects of social contexts (e.g. social distance, gender), which tend to represent ‘normative’ usages, or the hegemonic linguistic ideology. Actual language practices of Japanese speakers, however, do not always conform to such ‘normative’ usages. The present study analyzes actual conversational data with regard to honorifics and ‘gendered’ sentence-final forms. The analysis reveals wide variations in their uses, including many ‘deviant’ uses. These variations suggest that social categories, such as social distance and gender, cannot be abstracted from the context as independent variables determining language choice. That is, honorifics and ‘gendered’ sentence-final forms cannot be regarded as direct indexes of contextual features. I argue that the choice of indexical expressions is a strategy that is based on the speaker's consideration of multiple social aspects of the context as well as on his/her linguistic ideology, or beliefs and attitudes concerning language use. Variations in indexical uses are then explained in terms of the complexity of social context and the diversity of linguistic ideologies that mediate indexical processes. The view of indexicality employed in this study enables us to account for variations in the use of indexicals in a coherent manner without marginalizing what may otherwise be considered ‘deviant’ practices.