An emerging role-identity and honorifics: A longitudinal study of email exchanges in a Japanese community
Introduction
This study analyses emails circulated amongst a group of men who were members of a junior high school soccer team in the late 1970s. It looks into how they re-establish their social relations through online communication and renegotiate individuals' identities and roles within the group. Specifically, it focuses on a marked linguistic phenomenon – the emergence of honorifics in relation to the enactment of a particular social role, the social event organiser (kanji: 幹事 in Japanese), within the community. Kanji is a person who is assigned a role of organising and coordinating social events such as parties of many kinds for an office, club or group. Such social gatherings include shinnenkai (new year's party), hanami (flower-viewing party) and bōnenkai (end of year party).1 Usually the most junior member is expected to volunteer for this role. Or, sometimes, the role is rotated among staff members. The task usually involves contacting members to determine the most suitable date and venue for a given social event. There are many websites from which a newly appointed Kanji can seek advice. These websites feature manuals including how to notify people of events in writing, how to find suitable venues for various occasions, how to make everybody happy, and the ‘do's and don'ts' for those who are new to the Kanji role. The proliferation of these websites indicates the significance of the Kanji role in Japanese society.2
The study attempts to explicate how honorifics as linguistic indices, which are new to the community, are interpreted. The group represents a community with weak social ties, where members rarely meet except for a year-end party (bōnenkai), friendly soccer matches and occasional social gatherings which are organised when those who reside overseas return to Japan temporarily. Emails are only exchanged to notify and organise these events; exceptions include occasional funeral notices of the members' parents and news about newly born children.
In more specific terms, this longitudinal study investigates how the role-identity is reflected in the language use and how community norms are negotiated and challenged by the participants over the period of three years. Drawing on the notion of ‘relational work’ (Locher and Watts, 2008, Locher and Graham, 2010, Locher, 2013), (im)politeness, social role and identity formation, the study attempts to present various interpretations of email correspondence of the community, in particular the use of honorifics, from multiple vantage points and interpretive moments. It also highlights the multi-indexicality of honorifics beyond conventional meanings.
Section snippets
Relational work and (im)politeness
According to Locher and Watts (2008), ‘relational work’ is defined as “all aspects of the work invested by individuals in the construction, maintenance, reproduction and transformation of interpersonal relationships among those engaged in social practice” (p.96). In their notional construct of relational work, any researchers' predetermined definitions of (im)politeness are rejected and instead, four-way categorisation of judgements, ‘impolite’, ‘non-polite’, ‘polite’ and ‘over-polite’ (Locher
Multiple vantage points and evaluative moments
This study captures linguistic changes in the emails exchanged in the aforementioned local community from emic and etic understandings in conjunction with first-order and second-order perspectives. I follow Kádár and Haugh's (2013) understanding of the first-order and second-order distinction which is based on particular evaluative moments of situated meaning, rather than following the conventional distinction, between participant and analyst in the study of (im)politeness. First-order only
Identity and language use
According to Hall, identity is not conceptualised as self-images that are fixed and stable over a period of time, but is rather “socially constituted, a reflexive, dynamic product of the social, historical and political contexts of an individual's lived experiences” (Hall, 2002: 31). The language use of a community often provides researchers with a window of investigation, as Hall concisely explains the relation between language usage and identity:
[Social identities] embody particular histories
Norms and honorifics
The traditional view of honorifics is prescriptive and rule-governed, and assumes that honorifics index respect, deference and situational factors including conversational participants' social distance and hierarchical relations (Neustupny, 1978, Mizutani and Mizutani, 1987, Jorden and Noda, 1987, Makino and Tsutsui, 1995). Therefore, honorifics tend to be considered as key social indices to reflect the conversational participants' understanding of social role and position (tachiba) relative to
Participants and data
The participants are a group of friends who used to play soccer together in a junior high school team. They used to talk in plain form without using desu (copulative verb) or masu (verb suffix). They were in their late 40 s at the time of their online interactions analysed in this paper, and email was the primary means of communication particularly for those who reside overseas.
By the time the members from the late 1970s reconnected, twenty or so years after graduating from school, they may
Norms of the group
The members always use the ‘reply all’ function to send a message to the whole group. Although some of the members rarely post messages, emails are sent to all users. This arrangement has been a reflection of a tacit agreement whereby they maintain the inclusive nature of the community within. Although social networking tools, such as Mixi (the Japanese service which was once very popular) and Facebook are available, the group retains this mode of communication – or perhaps they are stuck in
Data analysis
The analysis focuses mainly on several email examples written by the same individual, Morita, organising parties and get-togethers for the group and thus taking on the role of Kanji. It first examines two examples (Email 1 and Email 2) in which Morita organised gatherings in an informal style which is similar to that of previous email exchanges among the group, and then Email 3 where there is an abrupt shift to a much more formal register resembling that of Kanji email templates found in advice
Interviewing Morita in December 2012
I met Morita in December 2012 to find out what was going through his mind during the email exchanges which are featured in this study. In fact, Morita kindly circulated an email to organise an informal gathering at an izakaya and eight of them including Seno and Okoma attended. After my refreshing Morita's memory about the email exchanges, Morita called for the attention of the other members. They gave me permission to record the conversation.
His use of minasan and desu is marked, but I did not
Discussion and conclusion
According to Morita, his use of honorifics was functional. Okoma and Seno went further to interpret it as Morita's enactment of Kanji, but Ohashi found it relationally distancing. Such divergent intentions and interpretations of stylistic choices and their indexical meanings even amongst members of a community of practice demonstrate the fundamental indeterminacy of indexical meanings.
Okoma and Seno's labelling Morita as Kanji and his subsequent identifying himself as lifetime Kanji is
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the members of my email community originated in a junior high school soccer team for ongoing friendship. I would like to express my sincere appreciation to anonymous reviewers for invaluable advice and insightful comments.
Jun Ohashi is a Senior Lecturer at the Asia Institute, The university of Melbourne. His ongoing research interests include interpersonal pragmatics, (im)politeness, critical discourse analysis, media literacy and linguistic rituals. Jun is the author of Thanking and Politeness in Japanese (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and has published papers in the Journal of Pragmatics, Multilingua, Journal of Japanese Studies, and many more. Jun's current research on progress is on small talk, and he uses his
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Jun Ohashi is a Senior Lecturer at the Asia Institute, The university of Melbourne. His ongoing research interests include interpersonal pragmatics, (im)politeness, critical discourse analysis, media literacy and linguistic rituals. Jun is the author of Thanking and Politeness in Japanese (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and has published papers in the Journal of Pragmatics, Multilingua, Journal of Japanese Studies, and many more. Jun's current research on progress is on small talk, and he uses his innovative analytical tool, the balance sheet of obligations, to make sense of how conversationalists evaluate small talk.