Abstract
Following a review of the past studies on Japanese honorifics, we claim that a new approach, based on real-time surveys of a speech community, will make a significant contribution to the field. Here we classify current approaches towards honorifics into four facets: (1) grammatical aspect, (2) socio-psychological aspect, (3) sociolinguistic aspect, (4) aspect in the sociology of language. Our literature review revealed that a large amount of attention has been paid to both the synchronic description of the phenomenon, and the analysis of the diachronic development of the honorific system in the history of Japanese language. What is required for the field at this stage, then, is an integration of the finding from both aspects. We show that it is best achieved through real-time surveys of a speech community, couched in the paradigms developed by the past NIJLA surveys and the Variation Theory. Okazaki Honorific Survey III, a research project initiated by NIJLA last year, aims at such an integration of the fields through working on a number of new research questions with newly developed analytical paradigms and techniques.
