English

ERIC ED117933: Japanese Terms of Address: Some Usages of the First and Second Person Pronouns. Papers in Japanese Linguistics, Vol. 1, No. 2.

This paper examines the following points: (1) how Japanese personal pronouns are used according to the speakers' social constraints, and (2) differences between males and females of the same occupational group in their use of personal pronouns. The dialect analyzed is the speech of Japanese faculty members at the University of Hawaii. A speaker of Japanese must evaluate his addresses in terms of a vertical axis of power and a horizontal axis of solidarity and their respective positions before selecting the proper first and second person pronouns. Pronouns may change during a conversation as relationships are discerned. Analysis of the professors' speech revealed that men frequently use a very informal and intimate first person pronoun with friends or family; women use more polite and less intimate pronouns with their parents than men do. Both men and women used kinship terms ("mommy,""daddy") instead of personal pronouns with their children. In use of second person pronouns, all males used different pronouns depending on their addressee, while 60 percent of women varied their use and 40 percent did not. Kinship terms are often used with siblings and parents, and women use a more fo

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