SOCIAL-CONTEXT, LINGUISTIC IDEOLOGY, AND INDEXICAL EXPRESSIONS IN JAPANESE

Honorifics and sentence-final particles as indexical signs have been w idely studied in Japanese pragmatics and sociolinguistics. Most previo us studies have directly related linguistic forms to aspects of social contexts (e.g. social distance, gender), which tend to represent 'nor mative' usages, or the hegemonic linguistic ideology. Actual language practices of Japanese speakers. however, do not always conform to such 'normative' usages. The present study analyzes actual conversational data with regard to honorifics and 'gendered' sentence-final forms. Th e analysis reveals wide variations in their uses, including many 'devi ant' uses. These variations suggest that social categories, such as so cial distance and gender, cannot be abstracted from the context as ind ependent variables determining language choice. That is, honorifics an d 'gendered' sentence-final forms cannot be regarded as direct indexes of contextual features. I argue that the choice of indexical expressi ons is a strategy that is based on the speaker's consideration of mult iple social aspects of the context as well as on his/her linguistic id eology, or beliefs and attitudes concerning language use. Variations i n indexical uses are then explained in terms of the complexity of soci al context and the diversity of linguistic ideologies that mediate ind exical processes. The view of indexicality employed in this study enab les us to account for variations in the use of indexicals in a coheren t manner without marginalizing what may otherwise be considered 'devia nt' practices.