Brown and Levinson Online - On the implications of politeness strategies and the Japanese desu/masu-form in a massively multiplayer online game

Abstract: Politeness in Japanese has been the subject of many linguistic inquiries. Overarching these is Brown and Levinson's (1987) influential but also criticized (see Matsumoto, 1988; Ide 1992) theory on politeness as a cross-linguistic factor. By looking into the desu/masu-form and how it contrasts the so called plain form in Japanese, I will show that some of the criticism is misplaced, partly due to how we define the vague term `politeness'. My data comes from the contemporary environment of an online game by using the output of its Japanese chat channels. I will relate my findings to earlier research on speech level style-shifts in Japanese (see Ikuta, 1983; Wetzel, 1988; Cook, 1996b, 1998, 2008; Maynard, 1991; Maynard, 1993). These show that the normative meaning of honorific expressions can have added pragmatic meaning as strategic implicatures outside of their normative nature. This lends credit to Brown and Levinson's theory for Japanese. Agreeing with Usami (2002) that honorifics need to be better accounted for in their theory, I will argue that it is important to distinguish between normative and non-normative use of honorific expressions. The deviations from normative use is where the implicature is created together with any added, non-normative pragmatic meaning.