An Introduction to The National Language Research Institute:
A Sketch of its Achievements
Third Edition(1988)/
HTML Version(1997)
[contens]|
[previous]|
[next]
II.1.16 A Sociolinguistic Investigation of the Honorific
Expressions in Japanese Private Enterprises
(Report 73, 1982. 508 pages)
This book is a report on an investigation entitled
"Sociological Research on Honorific Expressions" which was
carried out betweeen 1975 and 1977. The goals of this
research were to investigate the consciousness towards
honorific expressions of employees working in private
enterprises in present-day Japan and determine how the
employees actually used these expressions.
Previous investigations of the actual consciousness and use
of honorific expressions had been conducted primarily on
regional societies. In contrast, the society of the
workplace, a place where the Japanese people are engaged in a
variety of production activities, has rarely been used as an
object of an investigation of actual consciousness.
Investigation of the actual linguistic life of the
workplace, a society different from the household, regional
societies, etc., is essential for an understanding of the
overall picture of the linguistic life of the Japanese
people. In addition, the frequent, if not inevitable
reference to honorific expressions in the workplace in
general discussions of honorifics points to the crucial need for
research of the actual situation in this area.
For the present "Sociological Research on Honorific
Expressions," we conducted investigations based on written
questionnaires, oral interviews, and recorded data. Our
informants were employees of the private enterprises of the
Hitachi Ltd. and the Nittetsu Construction Materials Company
Ltd. (main office, business offices, and factories),
company housing residents, employees of stores managed by
private individuals, etc. in Tokyo, Ibaraki, Osaka and
Kyoto. The present report summarizes the results
obtained from investigations based on the written
questionnaires (1,087 informants) and oral interviews
(254 informants) of employees of large enterprises.
(1) Investigation Based on Written Questionnaires
We investigated the following areas: the informant's
sociological background (occupational status, age,
experience in present company, educational background, sex,
birthplace, etc.), degree of attention paid to speech,
consciousness of dialectal usage, opinions about the present and
future use of honorific expressions in the company,
recognition of honorific expressions, assessment of personal
relations in context, consciousness of factors related to
speech, consciousness of the addressee and politeness level,
experiences which the informants recalled that influenced
their acquisition of honorific expressions, childhood
linguistic environment, and consciousness of using the honorific
prefix, O-.
(2) Investigation Based on Oral Interviews in Private
Enterprises
We considered the following issues: quantity of private and
public conversation, ability to judge contexts, forms of
address (use of the suffix, -KUN, and other forms of
address), expression of second person actions (IKU KA, KURU
KA, IRU KA), expression of first person actions (IKU YO,
KURU YO, IRU YO). In particular, we focused on three verbs
(IKU, KURU, IRU), which have the same honorific
forms, IRASSYARU/OIDE NI NARU, and described and analyzed
expressions of first and second person actions in relation to the
sociological background of the speaker/addressee, i.e.,
occupational status, affiliation, etc.
NOMOTO Kikuo, WATANABE Tomosuke, NAKAMURA Akira and SUGITO
Seizyu directed this research.
[contens]|
[previous]|
[next]