The grammatical expression of social relations in Japanese
Changes in the functions of Japanese honorifics have accompanied changes in Japanese society over the course of a millennium, revealing strong evidence of mutual influence. The system began as a way of indexing respect for social superiors and humility of inferiors, allowing interactants to acknowledge allotted positions within a complex, hierarchical social system—the Japanese imperial court. This focus on the role of honorifics in reinforcing established, metaphorically vertical social relations is strongly maintained in the language ideologies of contemporary Japan. However, political and societal changes in pre-modern and early modern Japan and subsequent developments during the country’s rapid modernization were associated with the development of the honorific system into one that has far broader functions related to indexing other dimensions of social distance. While expressing vertical distance remains one important function of honorifics in Standard Japanese today, their use in marking closeness to ingroup and distance from outgroup has become even more important. The metaphorical expression of horizontal relations between speaker and addressee is the third major way in which honorifics index distance in contemporary Japan. Associated with this change in function has been a clear process of grammaticalization through which lexical honorifics expressing subjective judgements concerning the speaker’s relationship to referents develop over time into grammatical honorifics expressing intersubjective meanings, unrelated to propositional content but relevant only to the relationship between speaker and addressee.