2025 Volume 35 Issue 3 Pages 131-143
This study investigates the use of the polite (desu/masu) form in children’s everyday conversations by employing the Corpus of Everyday Japanese Conversation for Children (CEJC-Child), currently being developed by the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics. From approximately 50 hours of conversational data produced by ten target children in the CEJC-Child monitor version, utterances whose predicates were verbs or adjectives were extracted and classified according to plain vs. polite form, and the rate of polite form usage was calculated. The results showed that polite form began to be used consistently from around 2 to 2.5 years of age; however, the rate of polite form usage did not increase in proportion to age. A subsequent qualitative analysis of conversations with relatively high rates of polite form revealed two recurring patterns across multiple children: polite form was employed when speaking as someone other than one’s usual self, and when presenting information as certain and authoritative to the interlocutor.
https://ror.org/02caqc891 