Nexus of Language and Culture: A Study of Second Person Reference Terms in Japanese with Special Focus on Anata ‘You’

Abstract

This study explores the use of the second person pronoun anata ‘you’, with special reference to its functions and effects in Modern Japanese. Japanese has a complex system of personal reference terms. Their use is primarily determined by the social characteristics of the interlocutors, such as age, gender, kin relations and social status, as well as the level of formality of the conversational setting. This personal reference system is one of the linguistic resources used to comply with the important social norm of Japanese communication that requires constant acknowledgement of the relationship between interlocutors. Among the various personal reference terms, this study focuses on a particular second person pronoun anata ‘you’. Anata was originally a demonstrative directional reference term ‘that way’ and came to be used euphemistically to refer to an addressee as a politeness strategy. It was later semanticised as a formal/polite second person pronoun. The politeness value of anata has declined over time and in Modern Japanese, its properties have been unclear. A survey undertaken for this study has found that present-day native speakers of Japanese report that they do not use anata as a regular/default term. Instead, they perceive the term as entailing disparate nuances. Uncertainty about the properties of anata is apparent in the previous literature of Japanese linguistics. Some studies have treated anata as a formal/polite pronoun while others have regarded its use as entailing an impolite nuance. It has also been pointed out that anata has a certain function of controlling interlocutors’ distance. One of the major issues of the previous literature is that these studies have tended to focus only on partial aspects of the use of anata and consequently the core properties of this term have not been fully explored in an integrated manner. In empirically clarifying the use of anata through discourse analysis, the current study reveals that an indication of the degree of politeness or the interlocutors’ social characteristics are not genuine properties of anata. By adopting the notion of ‘absolute specification’, this study reveals that anata’s core property is its ability to absolutely specify the second person entity without displaying any of the interlocutors’ social elements. This property makes it possible for anata to occur in particular contexts, such as its impersonal use in reported speech or when referring to a general audience. At the same time, this property creates strong expressive effects in socially typified relationships. This is because its use does not display the interlocutors’ social relationship and hence conflicts with the socio-cultural norm of ‘relationship acknowledgement’ in Japanese communication. In this study, I attempt to systematically explain the mechanisms of how this inherent property of anata, absolute specification, interacts with established socio-cultural practices of the personal reference system in Japanese and creates expressive effects which cause users to attach disparate social meanings (e.g. polite, impolite, distant or intimate) to this word. In so doing, the study sheds light on some important aspects of the nexus between language and culture. Show more