Abstract: Finding a situationally-appropriate voice can be a difficult challenge for language learners. In Japanese, students are faced with a wide range of options for personal referents, terms of address, and verbal styles. Although many textbooks adopt “equivalents” for the English pronouns “I” and “you” (watashi and anata, respectively) in sample conversations and exercises, analyses of authentic discourse samples have shown that native speakers often perform self-reference and other-reference through different means, including the socially deictic system of keigo (honorific/humble politeness).

This presentation will first discuss the concept of social deixis and its varied manifestations in Japanese (contrasted with English), and will then illustrate these through specific examples from three discourse genres: business telephone calls, business e-mails, and everyday conversation. Data for the first two genres are taken from corpora collected by the author; spoken discourse samples are excerpted from a number of Miyazaki Hayao’s animated films.

My goal in highlighting these examples is to demonstrate the situated use of stylistic variation in Japanese, as well as the importance for learners in developing a socioculturally grounded knowledge and understanding of various discourse genres (Berkenkotter and Huckin 1995, Yoshimi 2008). Keigo can pose a seemingly insurmountable obstacle at the beginning of a learner’s journey in Japanese, but with appropriate guidance and practice, the road can be a fascinating and enriching one.

Lindsay Yotsukura
Associate Professor of Japanese
University of Maryland, College Park

Lindsay Yotsukura specializes in Japanese linguistics, focusing on discourse analysis and cross-cultural pragmatics (the use of language in context) from a pedagogical perspective. Publications include her book, Negotiating Moves: Problem Presentation and Resolution in Japanese Business Discourse (Elsevier, 2003), as well as numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, such as “Making inquiries: Toiawase strategies by Japanese L1 and L2 callers to Japanese educational institutions” (in Mori & Ohta, eds., Japanese Applied Linguistics: Discourse and Social Perspectives, Continuum 2008); “Negotiation and confirmation of arrangements in Japanese business discourse” (in Japanese Language and Literature 45 (1), 2011); and “Japanese business telephone conversations as Bakhtinian speech genre: Applications for second language acquisition” (in Hall, Vitanova, & Marchenkova, eds., Dialogue with Bakhtin on Second and Foreign Language Learning: New Perspectives, Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005). At the University of Maryland, Yotsukura directs the Japanese program and heads the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. She also teaches a variety of seminars, including the popular “Topics in Pragmatics: Stylistic Variation in the Films of Miyazaki Hayao”, and a 400-level course on Japanese business language and linguistics. Yotsukura has been awarded many grants and awards, including a Fulbright Research Fellowship, a Lilly Fellowship from UM’s Center for Teaching Excellence, and several Instructional Improvement Grants for teaching with technology. She also served as Resident Director for the Kyoto Consortium for Japanese Studies from 2011-2014 while on leave from the University of Maryland.