Abstract
There are parallelisms between the three dyads, 'avoidance relationship vs joking relationship', 'honorifics vs non-honorifics' and 'negative politeness vs positive politeness'. The latter two pairs differ from the first anthropological one in that they are pragmatic in nature. This study looks at these two pairs in terms of pragmatic relativity. Firstly, as a means of indicating 'distance' between people, honorifics/non-honorifics delineate a picture of the human relationship on the basis of the empathy of the speaker. This is not a socio-linguistic but a pragmatic phenomenon, in that the picture always differs depending on the speaker's assumption. Secondly, honorifics seem to perform many different discourse functions like showing deference, demeanor, formality, alienation, and affection, and sometimes the use of the one form can even have opposite functions like showing distance and proximity. This paper argues that context in discourse plays key role, and that in order to see how honorifics and non-honorifics work in discourse, it is necessary to devise a scheme which formulates the contextual relations between their semantic and pragmatic functions.
