Situational Meanings of Japanese Social Deixis: The Mixed Use of the Masu and Plain Forms

Abstract

This article explores indexical relations between honorific forms and their situational meanings by examining the Japanese addressee honorific masu form and its nonhonorific counterpart, the plain form. Arguing against a simple view of these forms as speech‐level markers, the article proposes that both addressee‐deference and speaker‐focused self‐presentation are indexical values of the masu form; the plain form is associated with an absence of these values. By examining two contrastive social situations, the article investigates ways in which co‐occurring contextual features foreground one value over the other.

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