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).
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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,
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came into being near 1900 (cf. Koyama, 2003). Interestingly, Pizziconi analyzes the
ﬁrst three (especially the ﬁrst two) only, missing the fourth and, more generally, the
sociohistoric reality giving rise to and lurking behind what she sees asocially and
ahistorically.
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