33.2135, Review: Japanese; Pragmatics; Semantics: Yonezawa (2021)

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Subject: 33.2135, Review: Japanese; Pragmatics; Semantics: Yonezawa (2021)

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Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2022 00:23:50
From: Susan Burt [smburt at ilstu.edu]
Subject: The Mysterious Address Term ''anata'' ‘you’ in Japanese

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36803637


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/33/33-22.html

AUTHOR: Yoko  Yonezawa
TITLE: The Mysterious Address Term "anata" ‘you’ in Japanese
SERIES TITLE: Topics in Address Research 4
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2021

REVIEWER: Susan Meredith Burt, Illinois State University

SUMMARY

This volume represents the author’s PhD dissertation at Australian National
University. Yonezawa discusses the multifunctionality of address forms—they do
both social and referential work—and asserts their dynamic rather than
prescriptive nature. The standardized address term anata, however, seems not
to behave like other Japanese second-person forms, and this volume is devoted
to understanding the reasons for its exceptional behavior. 

Chapter 1, the Introduction, sets out the reasons for considering anata
“mysterious”: address terms and person-reference terms are particularly
complex in Asian languages, and their dynamic nature (as opposed to being
prescribed) means that cultural values, social norms, stance, identity, and
language ideologies may all influence address and reference terms in complex
ways. A variety of terms may be used to refer to or address an addressee, a
second person pronoun, kinship term, occupational term, and the speaker’s
choice of term can reveal how the speaker views the relationship existing
between speaker and addressee, unless the speaker choses anata, which does not
index gender, age, or relative social status, and is compatible with
predicates or verbs in either the “plain” or “polite” forms. While these
features might make anata seem infinitely useable, native speakers report that
they avoid it and find it hard to use. Dictionaries define it in contradictory
ways; it used to be considered honorific but now the level of respect
associated with it has declined (Barke and Uehara (2005) present a diachronic
view of Japanese pronouns in which second-person pronouns suffer a relatively
rapid decline in politeness, similar to a euphemism-replacement cycle, which
requires constant enrichment with novel socially acceptable terms). The lack
of an integrated analysis of anata prompts Yonezawa’s research questions: 

How do native speakers of Japanese perceive and understand the use of anata
today?
What are the environments in which anata occurs in different types of
discourse?
Is there a core, invariant property of anata and, if so, what is it?
What are the functions and effects of the use of anata?
What are the mechanisms that create that create these functions and effects in
relation to different sociocultural contexts?
Is the recent historical context relevant to the use of anata today, in
particular, in relation to language policy and standardization? (p.8)

Focusing on the Tokyo standard dialect, Yonezawa uses multiple sources of data
for her analysis, a speaker survey using self-report, a discourse analysis of
conversation corpora, advertisements, parliamentary debates, and television
dramas, as well as newspaper articles and letters. Previous approaches to
anata, which the author categorizes as formality-ranking, sociolinguistic,
deixis-based, or cognitive, fail to give a complete account of the pronoun.
Yonezawa intends to analyze the pronoun as “semantically simple” (p. 31), and
“socially inert” (p. 32), with further situational understandings as
pragmatically available. 

In Chapter 2, Yonezawa gives extensive background on Japanese culture,
language, usage, ideologies, and history that is needed to understand the
issues with anata. Pronouns in Japanese come from a variety of sources, both
lexical (such as boku, ‘first person’, from a noun meaning ‘servant,’) and
demonstratives (such as the now obsolete konata, ‘this way,’ and sonata, ‘that
way’); anata (‘yon way’) was used first for third person reference, then, as
speakers used distancing as a politeness strategy, became second person. Anata
was then subjected to the euphemism-pejoration cycle described in Barke and
Uehara (2005), and by 1933, was considered inappropriate to use to a superior.
Yonezawa’s survey data show that both male and female current speakers are
also uneasy about using anata to address an equal or inferior. In general,
speakers choose address terms, whether pronouns, kinship terms, or
occupational terms, while highly cognizant of the vertical relationship
between themselves and the addressees. 

Chapter 3 focuses on native speakers’ perceptions of anata, with a participant
total of 428 speakers of both sexes, ranging in age from 16 to their 60s,
living in the Tokyo Metropolitan area, where they were either born, or  to
where they moved before the age of 4. University-based survey administrators
recruited a snowball sample to take the paper-based questionnaire, which
included both closed-response and open-response items. The results showed that
these speakers are wary about using anata: 93.6% would not use anata to
address a social superior; 67.6% would not use it to a perceived inferior, and
62.9% would not use it to a social equal. Thus, it is not a “default” pronoun
at all, but its use is situation-dependent. Anata is perceived as “rude” if
used to a powerful superior, but distant or detached if used to an older
relative. That distancing effect is perceived more strongly if the addressee
is a social inferior (“too formal, official, business-like and detached”
(p.77) ); speakers who use anata in such situations also can be perceived as
arrogant, another reason to avoid its use. While some speakers find anata
distant and cold because they consider it “inherently polite” (p. 79), 10% of
the women respondents find it too intimate to use to address a male equal,
although it is acceptable to use to address another woman. Thus, the pronoun
has “a distant versus intimate contradiction in its nuances” (p. 80). For some
speakers, the situation of use is more important than the relationship with
the addressee; thus, one could address an adversary in an argument with anata,
use anata instead of sensei to be “strategically offensive” (p. 83) to a
teacher, or use it when advising, admonishing, evaluating or scolding an
inferior. On the other hand, some speakers can use anata to an equal to show
closeness, friendliness, joking, or teasing. The author concludes that these
varying reactions show that anata is not inherently polite or rude, distant or
intimate, but that speakers infer these overtones pragmatically. 

Yonezawa argues in Chapter 4 that anata can specify its referent in a socially
undefinable relationship. Indeed, its core property is that it designates the
second person, the addressee(s). Anata is used to address members of unknown
audiences, such as readers/hearers of advertisements, readers of certificates,
respondents to questionnaires. Anata is used for “generic” functions of ‘you,’
as in Yonezawa’s example, “[If you want to teach fiction,] you have to examine
manuscripts” (p. 96). Anata may be used to address a collective entity, such
as a government, or  a de-personalized addressee, as in a courtroom, because
it carries no relationship information or information as to position on the
social hierarchy. Such usage may be seen in certain contexts as both detached
and fair. Thus, anata is appropriate and not offensive to use to address a
stranger; [this, I suspect, is why we Japanese-learners were taught to use
anata—as outsiders, we would not have been expected to have established
relationships with most of the Japanese people we would meet]. 

Chapter 5, “Absolute specification in a socially definable relationship,”
begins with a summary of the author’s argument: “the social norms of Japanese
communication…require constant acknowledgment of the relative social status
between interlocutors” (p. 117); using anata, which does not index
relationship or relative social status, is thus a departure from a social
norm. Conversational departure from what is expected or normal carries
pragmatic effects (Grice 1975). Chapter 5 covers two categories of pragmatic
effects that follow from addressing someone with anata, if a definable
relationship already exists between speaker and addressee, 1) the speaker
rejects that given relationship, or 2) the speaker seeks to address “the
addressee’s core self” (p. 137), regardless of their social relationship or
relative status. Yonezawa illustrates the first category with an example that
will be familiar to many English speakers: when I was a child, if my parents
called me Susie, all was well. If they addressed me as Susan Meredith Burt, I
knew I was in some kind of trouble. Similarly, Yonezawa offers examples from
television dramas: a student refuses to address his private tutor with the
expected form, sensei, but instead uses anata, because he does not trust that
the man is who he says he is. An employer addresses a housekeeper as anata
rather than LastName+san because he is angry with her. A younger brother
addresses his sister as anata instead of the expected aneki to show his
disdain for her when she takes a job as a barmaid. In the realm of
Parliamentary debates, Yonezawa reports that 97% of the anata-use in the
records she consulted constituted intentional offense or face-attack from one
member to another. However, among women friends, the use of anata can comprise
part of a jocular banter that emphasizes social closeness regardless of
relative social status. Anata in these cases evokes a variety of pragmatic
effects, but the effects are evoked for the same reason: the speaker has not
used the expected relationship-acknowledging address term.   The second
category of anata-use between interlocutors whose relationship is definable
comprises those instances in which a speaker tries to breach social boundaries
in order to speak with heartfelt sincerity. This use of anata occurs in songs
and poems, and survey respondents report thinking the usage beautiful in such
contexts. It can also occur in ordinary talk, in which an advice-giver might
use anata to the advisee, to emphasize that their defined relationship is not
as important as a sincere wish for a good outcome. 

Chapter 6, “Ideology, identity, reflexive processes, and the use of anata,”
addresses Yonezawa’s last research question, how post-war language policies
contributed to anata’s unique usage profile. Pronouns, including those in
other languages besides Japanese, can be a focus of ideology-tinged
interpretation, and thus, of language policies or reform (Baron 2020, Clyne,
Norrby and Warren 2009, Kluge and Moyna 2019, Norrby and Wide 2015,
Taavitsainen and Jucker 2002) In 1952, the National Language Council of Japan
proposed that anata’s lack of connection to social hierarchy made it the ideal
standard second-person pronoun for promoting egalitarianism. The ensuing
debate about this proposal extended for several decades. Yonezawa analyzes
excerpts from newspaper letters and opinion pieces spanning a range of
ideological positions. While those with an egalitarian ideology embraced the
anata proposal, others found use of the pronoun rude. Yonezawa cites a woman
who preferred to be addressed with a pronoun that refers to hontoo no jibun,
‘her true self’ (p. 155); another woman wrote that she preferred address terms
that made clear her social roles and position, rather than one that was
applicable to just anyone. Symmetrical anata use seems not to be possible: one
letter claimed that department store staff were not allowed to use anata to
address customers. Yonezawa concludes that a top-down imposed egalitarianism
may be difficult to establish. 

The final peculiarity discussed in Chapter 6 is the only gendered usage
associated with anata, the exclusive, non-reciprocal use by a wife towards her
husband. During the Meiji period, the gendered ideology labeled ryoosai-kembo,
‘good wife and wise mother,’ was promoted in women’s advice literature, and
its linguistic consequences were reflected in early 20th Century novels, which
Yonezawa cites. After WWII, reciprocal anata use was encouraged, but the use
by wife to husband is now considered archaic. 

Chapter 7 summarizes the argument of the entire book. 

EVALUATION

This volume is a valuable and fascinating contribution to the growing
literature on address. Yonezawa has gathered a variety of data types from a
variety of sources, and put them to work in support of a complex, detailed,
yet carefully and deftly articulated argument for her analysis. The result
will be of great interest not only to scholars in address research and in
Japanese linguistics, but also to scholars of im/politeness, pragmatics,
linguistic anthropology, and sociolinguistics. This book is simply excellent. 

REFERENCES:

Barke, Andrew, and Satoshi Uehara. 2005. Japanese pronouns of address: Their
behavior and maintenance over time. In Lakoff, Robin T. and Sachiko Ide
(eds.): Broadening the Horizon of Linguistic Politeness, pp. 301-313.
Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins. 

Baron, Dennis. 2020. What’s Your Pronoun: Beyond He & She. New York and
London: Norton. 

Clyne, Michael, Catrin Norrby, and Jane Warren (eds.). 2009. Language and
Human Relations: Styles of Address in Contemporary Language. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

Grice, H. P. 1975. Logic and conversation. In Cole, Peter, and Jerry L. Morgan
(eds.): Syntax and Semantics, vol. 3: Speech Acts, pp. 41-58.  New York:
Academic Press.

Kluge, Bettina, and María Irene Moyna (eds.). 2019. It’s not all about ‘you’:
New perspectives on address research. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John
Benjamins.

Norrby, Catrin and Camilla Wide (eds). 2015. Address Practice as Social
Action: European Perspectives. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 

Taavitsainen, Irma, and Andreas Jucker (eds.). 2002 Diachronic Perspectives on
Address Term Systems. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Susan Meredith Burt, Professor Emerita at Illinois State University, wrote her
1986 UIUC dissertation on deictic verbs and indirect quotation in Japanese.
She is a member of INAR, the International Network for Address Research; her
favorite part of speech is the personal pronoun.





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