Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 1507–1514 www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma Discussion note How to do historic pragmatics with Japanese honorifics Wataru Koyama Graduate School, Rikkyo University, 3-34-1 Nishi Ikebukuro, Toshima-ku, Tokyo 171-8501, Japan Received 8 April 2003; received in revised form 24 April 2003; accepted 24 April 2003 1. Four dogmas of modern pragmatics Like other pragmaticians today, Pizziconi (this issue) demonstrates quintessential modernist linguistic ideologies that must be put into a critical-scientific perspective: i.e., (1) modern nationalism, (2) modern ahistoric universalism and rationalism, (3) modern empiricism (anthropo-centric micro-sociologism), and (4) modern Idealism. In what follows, I shall discuss them one by one and, in so doing, suggest a more critical-scientific account of some of the phenomena discussed by Pizziconi (cf. Koyama, 1997, 2000a,b, 2001, 2003). 2. Modern nationalism As any social scientist knows, one of the defining features of modernity is modern nationalism, which typically sees a one-to-one correspondence between nation and state. Before modernity, there was a clear distinction between, on the one hand, (1) nations of small sizes such as ethnic groups, clans, households, patronage-based relationships, and other local communities—generally characterized by reciprocitybased communitarian economy, where sociocentric normative demands to give gifts, favors, privileges, and the like, and to return them compulsively bound community members (cf. Mauss, 1967 [1925])—and, on the other hand, (2) multi-ethnic and— lingual empires, kingdoms, states, and other territorial polities—generally characterized by plundering (tribute, tax)-and-redistribution-based political economy, which operated, in principle, independently of local communities. In addition, there was (3) (mercantile) capitalist economy, based on the (exchange-)value differentials E-mail address: [email protected] (W. Koyama). 0378-2166/03/$ - see front matter # 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/S0378-2166(03)00078-X 1508 W. Koyama / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 1507–1514 across different economic communities and at least latently observed in religious exchanges, which took place in sanctuaries or otherworldly places, typically located between—hence, outside—local communities or polities, which were fundamentally secular in character. For sociohistoric reasons analyzed by Marx, Weber, Sombart, the third mode of economy began to expand drastically and became dominant, in reaction to which (1) nations (communities) and (2) states (polities) were transformed to secure a necessary degree of communitarian (national) identities and stable political relations, which are not properly addressed by essentially international and inter-state capitalism, which proliferates between social systems. That is, while local communities, especially intermediate ones, were demolished by the increasingly all-encompassing international community of capitalism, capitalism became a dominant concern of states, and the demolition of local communities was compensated by the artificial lamination of nations onto states, which resulted in modern nation-states (see Karatani, 2001; Koyama, 2003, for details). This is a socio-historic condition of modernity, in and on the basis of which many pragmaticians unwittingly ideologize ‘language’. Hence, Pizziconi consistently calls the linguistic variety of Japanese that she has somehow chosen to analyze, namely the modern Tokyo-standard variety of Japanese, ‘‘the Japanese language’’ tout court (cf. Koyama, 2001). It is easy to see linguistic nationalism at work in this un-scientific discourse. That is, despite the fact that honorifics and honorification, which Pizziconi discusses, are phenomena of speech communities, but not linguistic communities (to use the standard Gumperzian distinction), her nationalistic consciousness makes her identify the speech community of the Tokyo-standard variety—i.e., the standard variety of the modern Japanese nation-state—with the linguistic community of Japanese. The magnitude of the distorting ideological effect entailed by the modern nationalist false consciousness may be indicated by scientific investigations into the speech communities of Japanese, which show that the language is in fact used in many speech communities where there are no honorifics: e.g., traditional basilects used all the way from Fukushima prefecture to Shizuoka prefecture on the Pacific in the central-eastern province of the Main Island (see Inoue, 1999). Historically, honorifics were something like regional features of the western part of the JapaneseRyukyuan archipelago, but not much of the eastern half. It started to spread to Edo (today’s Tokyo) and castle towns in the eastern half in the Edo period (1603–1868), which explains why the modern Tokyo-standard honorifics show many a western (i.e., Kyoto) dialectal feature such as an u onbin Sandhi rule: e.g., akou-goza-i-mas-u (akou akak-u ‘red’-nonpast; goza(r)-=non-subject (‘humble’) honorific ‘be’; -i-=connective; mas-=addressee-honorific; -u=nonpast), but not the eastern dialectal akak-u. After the Meiji bourgeois revolution of 1868, the honorific usage of the Edo samurai acrolect—which became a prototype of the modern Tokyo-standard variety— was powerfully promoted by the Old Hegelian Meiji state through school education and other state-ideological apparatuses, as a result of which, for example, the addressee-honorifics des- and mas-, at least one of which hardly existed in Japanese speech communities before the dawn of modernity but which Pizziconi gives a privileged treatment, became widely used all over the modern nation-state (cf. W. Koyama / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 1507–1514 1509 Koyama, 1997). Nonetheless, many basilects in the Toˆhoku (northeastern) province of the Main Island, for example, have not adopted much of the Tokyo-standard honorific usage or honorifics, especially ‘humble’ referent honorifics. Clearly, if one purports to deal with honorifics and honorification in Modern Japanese, one ought to describe and analyze all those varieties, inter alia the contemporary socio-historic interactions between the Tokyo-standard and the ‘sub-standard’ dialectal varieties of Japanese (cf. Koyama, 2003). 3. Modern ahistoric universalism and armchair rationalism Like most pragmaticians in their modern armchairs, Pizziconi sees ‘language’ only from a modern Eurocentric perspective, which is ethnocentrically universalistic and ahistoric in character. Thus, historic facts that clearly indicate the critical limits of modern rationalism and universalism are conveniently erased in her ideological account. For example, (1) although historical linguists have shown the cross-linguistically significant roˆle played by language users’ analogical rationalization (i.e., re-analysis) based on surface lexical items for language change (cf. Anttila, 1989), and (2) although historical pragmaticians have shown the cross-linguistically significant roˆle played by language users’ ideological ascription of macro-social indexical categories (of regionality, gender, class, status, occupation, generation) to surface lexical items for social and even linguistic-structural changes (see below), Pizziconi ignores the historically attested unique roˆle played by lexicalization, involved in honorifics (vs. honorification), and focuses only on the micro-social, synchronic, general pragmatic process centered around the (micro-social) speech event of hic et nunc, where both macro-social indexical categories (see above) and macro-social symbolic categories (e.g., quasi-structural lexical items) are microsocially indexed as presupposable regularities to create some indexical effects here and now (see Koyama, 2001). That is, she fails to underscore the distinct, specific pragmatic processes involved in, on the one hand, (1) what Labovians call ‘sociolinguistic stereotypes’ (often articulated as the belief ‘‘Such-and-such people speak so-and-so’’)—where the empirical, probabilistic correlation between macro-social indexical categories and the tokens of linguistic forms (be they suprasegmental or segmental) is ideologically replaced with the (believed, intensional) categorical correlation between them, as a result of which the tokens may be used to index the social indexical categories more strongly than the tokens of non-stereotyped forms (cf. Irvine, 1992; Silverstein, 1992)—and, on the other hand, (2) a sub-type of sociolinguistic stereotypes, namely, lexicalized social emblems (i.e., registers), such as honorifics (vs. honorification)—where some macro-social indexical categories are ideologically ascribed by language users to some particular lexical items as the latter’s inherent intensional properties, which thus come to have social-indexical illocutionary forces in themselves. The distinction is crucial, as it explains an ideologically, lexically mediated mechanism by which language and society historically and macro-socially change. For instance, as Silverstein (1985) has shown, Modern Standard English has a peculiar pronominal paradigm not having any formal distinction in the number 1510 W. Koyama / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 1507–1514 category for the second person (vs. the first and third) precisely due to the ideologically charged historic process that involved the 17th century English Quakers’ and non-Quakers’ native ideologization that squarely located the social-indexical categories of ‘non-politeness’, ‘literal and divine truth’, and ‘true believers like Quakers’ in the surface lexical item thou, in binary opposition to ‘politeness’, ‘human hubris, folly, and wretchedness’, and ‘proto-latitudinarian liberals, Baconian scientists, and other non-Puritans’, ascribed to you (singular). Similarly, any socially aware student of Japan cannot fail to see that the honorifics and honorific usage of the modern national standard variety of Japanese, which Pizziconi exclusively discusses, have been promoted and diffused all over the modern nation-state partially through the ideological propaganda launched by Japanese ideologues of modern nationalism, reinvented on the basis of West-imported Old Hegelianism and Victorian moralism, from ca. 1890 (Meiji 23) onward, such as Tokyo University Professors Hozumi Yatsuka’s (1860–1912), Inoue Tetsujiroˆ’s (1855–1944), and Haga Yaichi’s (1867– 1927) works on ‘Japan as an ethnic nation’ and ‘Japanese national characters’ and the works on honorifics written by the native grammarians Matsushita Daizaburoˆ (1878–1935), Yamada Yoshio (1873–1958), Kindaichi Kyoˆsuke (1882–1971), and Tokieda Motoki (1900–1967), all arguing, at least in effect, that the Tokyo-standard honorific register showed ‘‘the natural national (Japanese) tendency to respect the [hierarchical] social order [created by the Meiji state]’’ (cf. Koyama, 2003). Thus, the linguistic data discussed by Pizziconi have been historically, socially, and ideologically created and maintained by a national political process of which she remains unaware, as she blindly succumbs to modern nationalism, ahistoric universalism, armchair rationalism, and other Benjaminian phantasmagorias, all conspiring to hide historic reality from our narrow-minded micro-social ideological horizon of (post-)modernity (see below). Further, although Pizziconi criticizes Levinsonian, i.e., Standard Average European, theorists’ focus on ‘universal politeness strategies’ (qua egocentric face-works) and, at the same time, Japanese scholars’ on ‘particularly Japanese honorifics’ and their usage (qua sociocentric demeanors), she actually subscribes to the modern ideological metaphor of [Westerners: Japanese:: egocentric individualists: sociocentric collectivists], insofar as she fails to note that the sociolinguistic stereotypes commonly found in the Japanese speech communities include not just the honorific register and a few other sociolinguistic stereotypes she discusses. In other words, her modern nationalistic consciousness and perhaps the emblematic character of the Tokyo-standard honorific register have ‘seduced’ her to adopt an ideological perspective in which particular national cultures of language are essentializingly compared, as a result of which the kind of Japanese sociolinguistic stereotypes manifest in non-Tokyo-standard Japanese speech communities that is also found in the modern Standard Average European ones—in particular, non-lexicalized ones—has almost totally escaped her attention. That is, there is no mention of the historic fact that, before the Meiji revolution of 1868, at the Kyoto imperial court, the Shogunate’s Edo castle, and other higher echelons of the society, reticence, soft voice, silence, and other static or ‘cold’ features were ascribed higher social status, while verbosity, loudness, eloquence, and other dynamic or ‘hot’ ones were ascribed lower W. Koyama / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 1507–1514 1511 status and thus categorically (ideologically) linked to deference entitlement, more or less as in the Wolof speech community (cf. Irvine 1992). Even in modernity, the figures who represent the ‘invented traditions’ of the modern Japanese national culture, such as Emperor Showa (Hirohito, 1901–1989) and other nobles, have been noticeably inarticulate speakers, their inarticulation being indexical of their noble status. More importantly, in modern Japanese ‘traditional’ dialects, such as that of Kyoto, denotational explicitness, elaboration, fast tempo, etc., are often ascriptively and categorically linked to the social indexical forces such as the speaker’s lack of deference to the addressee and the speaker’s cultural crudeness (cf. Koyama, 2001). Note that denotational implicitness/explicitness in commanding/requesting speech acts are also strongly correlated with the ideologically indexed degrees of deference entitlement and the speaker’s cultural sophistication in the Standard Average European middle-class speech communities (cf. Ervin-Tripp, 1976). 4. Modern empiricism (ego-, origo-, and anthropo-centric micro-sociologism) As suggested above, Pizziconi’s failure to underline the distinction between registers and other sociolinguistic stereotypes may be related to her modern micro-sociologism, which tries to reduce all social phenomena, especially linguistic structure and its lexical items, including ‘registered’ ones such as honorifics, to micro-social agents, despite the Durkheimean thesis that linguistic structure is a macro-social fact, not reducible to the micro-social. Note that Pizziconi (p.c.) maintains: ‘‘Firstly, no matter how strongly social constraints act on Japanese individuals, they cannot rely on ‘society’ (?) [sic] when it comes to expressing themselves, and they must make autonomous moves (external norms do not exist ‘out there’ but are internal and subjective representations of social relations and conventions)’’. In contrast, Durkheim (1965 [1915]), studying totemic phenomena of social emblematization in ‘aboriginal’ Australia, insisted that such macro-social norms do exist outside individuals. Indeed, Foucault (1973 [1966]) identified the ‘individual’ which Pizziconi ahistorically thinks exists universally, as ‘‘the empirical-transcendental doublet’’, characterizing modern man, who has internalized external (transcendental) norms within himself, who is a merely empirical being, and thus become an autonomous (i.e., transcendentalempirical) subject. Here, recall that, in medieval Europe, norms existed ‘‘out there’’ (vs. hic et nunc of the modern world) in the heavenly universe, not the earthly one: Consider Blumenberg (1987), showing that the Ptolemaic-Aristotelian cosmology of the middle ages was theo-centrically organized around the heavenly universe (cf. the Prime Mover), in contrast to the Copernican-Newtonian one, anthropocentrically organized around empirical-theoretical scientists [also observe the (neo-)Platonic cosmology of Heavenly Ideas as Real, vs. earthly beings as unreal]. Similarly, in East Asia, including China, Korea, and Japan, norms existed ‘‘out there’’ in the heavenly universe, especially the starry Northern Dragon around the polar star; hence the idea of ‘the Son of Heaven’ (i.e., the emperor as the earthly being closest to heavenly and thus real beings). In other words, pace Pizziconi’s armchair modernist doxa, in the Japanese-Ryukyuan (Okinawan) archipelago before modernity, transcendental 1512 W. Koyama / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 1507–1514 norms did not exist hic et nunc in the empirical universe, centered around the deictic center of the speech event or the ego, but in the transcendental heavenly realms of Amitabha Buddha (for believers of the very popular Pure Land neo-Buddhist Sects), the polar star, the Han’s China as the home of East Asian Confucian civilization (vs. ‘barbarians’ around China, such as the Manchurians, Mongols, Koreans, Nivkh, Ainu, Japanese, Vietnamese), and so on (cf. Koyama, 2003). Naturally, since language is always situated in social history, the historic shift of transcendental normativity from macro-social things (e.g., the heavens, historic origin, cosmological center) to micro-social things (e.g., the speaker and hearer hic et nunc) has been fairly clearly related to the historic linguistic shift from the focus on (relatively macro-social) referent honorifics to (micro-social) addressee honorifics in the Japanese speech communities that have (come to have) honorifics and related honorification (cf. Koyama, 1997; Inoue, 1999). Pizziconi has failed to see such a significant historic process that has given rise to the linguistic data she analyzes, at least partially because of her modern myopic micro-sociologism and ahistoric universalism. 5. Modern linguistic Idealism Hence, historic reality, be it linguistic or otherwise, has rather consistently escaped Pizziconi’s ideological account. And so, let us finally note that Pizziconi, like other Idealistic naı¨ve language users, ideologically and translucently projects the politicaleconomic condition in which she is located onto what she purports to analyze, namely ‘language’. The issue concerns the tension between universalist and culturalparticularist theories today. To resolve the modern antinomy, Pizziconi advances a quasi-Chomskian, -Levinsonian, and -Habermasian schema of modern (Eurocentric) universal matrix plus culture- or language-specific parametricization and, in so doing, joins the camp of ‘open-minded and culture-sensitive (liberal) universalists’. In contrast, a Marx would find that the two kinds of modern theories have been socially and ideologically generated by the specific historic conditions of modernity in which the theorists/ideologues are located. Here, note the seemingly curious fact that agentive-individualist pseudo-universal theories, such as Levinson’s, are typically supported in the Anglophone world, whereas collectivist ‘(pseudo)-cultural particularist’ theories, linguistic or otherwise, are more popular in Japan, Germany, France (especially recently), and, above all, Arabic ones. This must ring the bell about what those theories really are: ideologies articulating the modern socio-economic conditions in which ‘language’ is theorized (ideologized). That is, most ideologues in the modern imperial nation-states that have been successfully taking advantage of the international (‘universal’) expansion of capitalism typically argue against cultural particularism and collectivism (read ‘protectionist measures’, ‘state-sponsored oligopoly’, and other ‘political-economic centralization policies adopted by capitalistically less favored nation-states to protect themselves from, or successfully compete with, more favored ones’) and for universal individualism (read ‘individuals’ rights [to possess personal properties]’, ‘(neo-)liberalism’, and ‘laissezfaire economy’), whereas many ideologues in the societies that are late-comers to the W. Koyama / Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 1507–1514 1513 game and have never been hegemonic argue for the former and against the latter. To see the reason why, let me suggest what modern capitalism in particular and modernity in general are. To begin, note that the societies that are newly and willy-nilly integrated to the capitalist universe not only have to undergo drastic disruption in their old systems of values, but also find themselves deprived of the valuables of the capitalist universe, such as money and other objects called ‘capital’, possessed by the societies that have already undergone ‘primitive capital accumulation’ and ‘secondary industrialization’, and believed by the inhabitants of the post-Calvinist universe to immanently possess — like honorifics and other ‘registered’ linguistic forms (see above)—the symbolic values cherished in post-Calvinist, Benthamite societies such as efficiency, rationality, productivity, utility, calculability, manipulablility, multipliability, reproducibility, expeditiousness, expedience. The effect of this may be most blatantly seen in colonized societies and at the peripheries of world capitalism, but, earlier in the game, i.e., in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, Japan, Germany, and others which joined the game of endless and purposeless capital formation after Britain had made a decisive head start, were subject to the pressure of Anglo-centric international capitalism to expeditiously carry out capitalist social transformations. Thus, they were motivated to mobilize the efficiently manipulable institutions such as the state apparatus and stock system to implement expedient measures of state capitalism like political-economic centralization, so as to promote the concentration of capital and the generation of financial capital necessary for the rapid introduction of the large-scale machine industry. As the machine industry was not as labor-intensive as the agricultural industry and did not absorb much labor population, this led to the formation of relative surplus population, who generally stayed in the agrarian countryside. Consequently, agricultural fields became relatively scarce and land rents became exorbitant, which resulted in dire poverty and miseries in the countryside, such as the northeastern (Toˆhoku) province in Japan. This led to social disruption, fueled the anti-state Liberty and People’s Rights Movement, and suggested the prospect of large-scale uprisings, if not a democratic revolution. Thus, from the early-to-mid 1880s onwards, the Meiji state adopted Old Hegelianism, formulated the national collectivist ideology of ‘family state’, and propagated it through military education, school education, the Meiji Constitution (1889), and the mass media. As suggested above, the spread of the Tokyo-standard (including its honorifics) and the Old Hegelian sociocentric construal of ‘Japanese honorifics’ was important part of this process (cf. Takiura, 2001, 2002; Koyama, 2003). Perhaps more important, however, was the role played by international wars, such as the Sino-Japanese (1894–1895) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), for raising the Japanese national (collective) consciousness, as they alleviated blatant intergroup conflicts of economic and social interest within the nation-state and made more or less all Japanese think that their nation-state’s success in the international game of imperialism and colonialism would benefit all national subjects (to the detriment of neighboring East Asians). Thus, the collective phenomena of modern state-nationalism, such as (1) honorifics, (2) the Tokyo-standard variety, (3) the Old Hegelian ideology of ‘social demeanor’, and (4) warfare—and then welfare-state, 1514 W. 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