Presenter(s): Allene Shaw
Faculty Mentor(s): Kaori Idemaru
Oral Session 1 SW
The purpose of this study is to examine linguistic relationships between phonetics (the way people sound) and politeness in Japanese. Prior studies investigated voice characteristics in Japanese deferential speech (addressed to persons of superior social status) and non-deferential speech (used with persons of equal or inferior status). They found that the Japanese language exploits phonetic features to express politeness (Idemaru et al, forthcoming). Their study, however, observed overall intonation for entire utterances. I propose to conduct a more detailed analysis of their data, by dividing utterances into meaningful phrases in order to determine where in a sentence intonation is employed to express politeness. Understanding how and where important social cues like politeness are embedded in speech is critical for understanding how communications work in Japanese society and also for developing language and cultural fluency, particularly for non-native language learners.
Traditional research on politeness typically focused on type of words and grammatical features used to communicate politeness in various languages. However, a new wave of research began examining other dimensions such as voice characteristics and gestures (e.g., Winter and Grawunder, 2012; Brown et al 2014; Idemaru et al., forthcoming) with the theoretical view that speakers employ multiple politeness strategies to ensure successful communication. Their results indeed demonstrate that multiple linguistic and non-linguistic features contribute to produce the intended meaning of politeness. This study attempts to advance these efforts further. I will use the same data analyzed in Idemaru et al. (forthcoming) to measure and analyze important acoustic features (pitch, intensity, voice quality) at critical regions within words or phrases. This study will yield a more accurate understanding of the phonetic basis for one of the most fundamental Japanese social cues – politeness.