Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 345

Part of Session 114: Linguistic Identity Constructions in the Japanese Workplace (Other abstracts in this session)

Male employees’ use of referent honorifics in Japanese workplace: Construction of a professional self

Authors: Cook, Haruko M
Submitted by: Cook, Haruko M (University of Hawaii, United States of America)

From the social construction perspective, this paper examines how male and female employees use referent honorifics in the Japanese workplace. The finding that the male employees use most of the referent honorifics in the company’s meeting challenges the deeply-rooted assumption in the field of sociolinguistics that women use linguistically more “polite” forms than do men (e.g., R. Lakoff 1975).

Honorifics are traditionally viewed as linguistic forms that are used in speech between speakers and/or referents in a vertically or horizontally distant relationship: they express politeness by giving deference to a higher social status person, or indicate the formality of the speech situation. Furthermore, based on the assumption of one-to-one mapping between honorifics and politeness, it is generally viewed in Japanese sociolinguistic practice that Japanese women use more honorifics than men because they are more polite. However, these views are problematic: i) the function of honorifics is to mirror the pre-existing social world; and ii) women’s linguistic behavior is described in a context-independent fashion. More recently, studies on honorifics and those on gender and language based on naturally occurring data have demonstrated i) honorifics do not always index politeness reflecting the social status of the interlocutors and can index a variety of social identities (e.g., Cook 2008); and ii) the stereotypical association between women’s behaviors and so-called “feminine linguistic forms” is not always borne out (e.g., Okamoto & Shibamoto-Smith 2004). To date, however, there has not been any study that investigated if women use more referent honorifics in actual practice. This paper fills this gap by exploring i) in what ways Japanese referent honorifics are used in a corporate meeting and ii) whether or not referent honorifics are associated with female gender construction as previously assumed.

The data were taken from a committee meeting in a large beverage company in Japan, for referent honorifics tend to occur more frequently in business talk. The committee consists of two male and five female participants. The meeting, which lasted one hour and twenty minutes, was video-recorded. The transcribed data are qualitatively and quantitatively analyzed.

Contrary to the stereotypical view of gender and honorifics, this paper finds that the male participants produce thirty-two of the thirty-three referent honorifics occurring in the meeting and that this gender difference in the use of referent honorifics is related to the difference in participation structure in the meeting – the male participants’ leading roles in discussion and the female participants’ less active contribution to discussion. The paper demonstrates that referent honorifics index the speaker’s institutional identity in a company meeting. In sum, the paper demonstrates that in this meeting, referent honorifics do not index politeness but rather are utilized by male participants to foreground their stronger and more committed institutional identity.

References:

Cook, H. 2008. Socializing Identities through Speech Style. Bristol: Multilingual Matters

Lakoff, R. 1975. Language and Women’s Place. New York: Harper and Row.

Okamoto, S. & Shibamoto-Smith, J. 2004. Japanese Language, Gender, and Ideology . Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 240-255.

Sociolinguistics Symposium 19

Programme: accepted abstracts

Male employees’ use of referent honorifics in Japanese workplace: Construction of a professional self