The book of rites, (written a century before Christ) is one of the ancient Chinese classics which deals with the ethical principles of that period. Among these principles there are many concerning the norms (prescriptive uses) of language, especially variation with regards to address terms in view of social factors, Confucian values and the world view. This paper, after an analysis of all the prescriptive uses of address terms in The book of rites, concludes as follows: (1) The book of rites illustrated very clearly the norms for interpersonal relations and provided many linguistic and social contexts for the appropriate conditions for terms of address. (2) The interlocutors in The book of rites was mainly limited to the upper class of the period, thus characterizing the upper class register of ancient Chinese. (3) In The book of rites, the function of address terms serving as polite expressions was mainly manifested by using different forms to people with different social status. (4) In the applications of address terms in The book of rites, apart from the hierarchy within a society, the hierarchy between two societies played a role as well. (5) The norms of the address terms in The book of rites were influenced by the language consciousness of the period which was in turn influenced by predominant Confucian values and the world view of Ying Yang in that period.

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This paper introduces the results of the studies of KEIGO-HYOGEN (politeness expressions) attained by the team of the co-authors. By doing so, it also gives some criticism of the "Politeness" theory of Brown & Levinson (1987) and other studies of politeness based on it. The following are the main points of the criticism; 1. Politeness studies should be conducted at the discourse level of language. The present framework of Brown & Levinson's theory covers only sentence level politeness. 2. Some politeness expressions have positive politeness and negative politeness simultaneously. Thus any universal politeness theory should give a clear explanation on this phenomenon. 3. Any description of expressions of "being considerate" in a specific language should share a common framework with other languages of different cultural backgrounds. Giving too much stress on the uniqueness of a specific cultural feature could hinder the constructive development of politeness studies.

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This paper analyzes changes in haru-keigo and the honorific system of female Kyoto-city dialect by comparing the usage of honorifics in sharebon, written in the second half of the Edo era, with present day data from the actual conversations of middle aged and senior speakers. As a unique feature of the dialect, it can be observed in casual settings that subject honorific infixes are more frequently used referring to a third person than to a second person. This feature, which mainly occurs amongst middle aged speakers, is also confirmed in conversations of senior speakers, but it is not found in the data from the Edo era. However, the sharebon data show the varieties used referring to a third person are not same as those used referring to a second person.

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Research up to now has shown that Treatment Expression usage rules of the Kinai (central Kinki) area dictate that the following constructions be used according to the social position of the third person topic of the sentence: haru-forms (high), aru-forms (medium) and oru-forms (low). In this paper, I demonstrate that in addition to these usage rules regarding social status, the perceptions, evaluations, emotions held by the speaker towards the third person also affect the usage of these forms. Furthermore, we note that these usage rules are applied not only towards people but towards inanimate objects such as rain as well. The author proposes that when examining the usage of Kinai area Treatment Expressions, different standards from those applied to the dialects of Eastern Japan be employed. With the rise of a capitalist economy from the Late Middle Ages on, the importance of economic might developed in urban Kinai society alongside the traditional concept of social position, and within Western Japan, the linguistic importance of this concept is especially evident in the Kinai area.

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In order to examine two aspects of politeness: language use based on social norms and strategic language use, the author analyzed the data of 37 pairs of conversations between complete stranger same sex university students to examine their speech level control. One of the most powerful social norms of politeness was to set the same basic speech level when they were paired with a partner of equal social power. Showing "approach", level of formality, etc. by setting the basic speech level or by speech level shift can be considered to be another side of politeness, that of strategic language use.

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The objective of this paper is to investigate the recognition of speech styles and social distance through the Japanese expressions used by foreign students from China and Taiwan and native Japanese. The subjects were asked to complete a Discourse Completion Test. I analyze the results of the expression test focusing on polite style (desu/masu-style) and plain style (da/dearu-style). The findings derived from the study show that the Chinese and Taiwanese students chose their speech styles according to "social distance" and to the "costs" they should pay, while the Japanese tested chose ones according to "in-group/out-group" differences. Though Japanese express their intimacy to an "in-group" person in the plain style without sacrificing politeness, it is difficult for foreign students to learn the effective use of the plain styles for "in-group" people.

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Sinhala is a language spoken in Sri Lanka. The language has a system of honorifics: polite expressions and vulgar words. When ordinary people refer to Buddha and speak to Buddhist priests, the expressions they use must follow an obligatory set of rules to show respect. The language also has forms of expressions which are directed especially to ones juniors: personal pronouns and the imperative of verbs assume some selected forms. The selection of forms indicates how one person regards the others.

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In recent years, the use of cell phones for e-mail has grown in popularity, particularly among young people. In this genre of texts a number of characteristics have developed in the orthography, in the use of kanji (characters of Chinese origin), and hiragana and katakana (phonetic syllabic characters). Among these phenomena are: extended uses of kanji, and the abbreviation of kanji compounds; the omission of okurigana, which show the inflectional endings of Japanese words written in kanji; a different tendency in erroneous input of kanji compared with errors seen in texts input on computer; extended uses of hiragana; abbreviation of words written in katakana; and the expression of numbers with kanji rather than with Arabic numerals. These characteristics seem to be the result of a number of factors working separately, or in concert: conditions in which the text is input (surroundings and the apparatus used); software used for conversion of characters; practical limits on the number of characters used in e-mail; and interpersonal relationships. Further, the orthography that has developed in cell-phone e-mail has now extended into other genres, and its influence may be seen on individuals' understanding and learning of kanji, and in forms of handwritten kanji with fewer strokes which reflect the shapes that appear in the cell-phone displays.

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This study on 'ra-nuki' verbs (i.e. innovative potential verb forms) contrasts male and female attitudes toward linguistic expressions and their actual usage, and examines the discrepancy between the two. In a cartoon completion task, more men than women used the old conservative potential forms, whereas more women used innovative potentials. On the contrary, a semantic differential (SD) questionnaire survey reveals that women consider the innovative potential 'tabereru' ('to eat') to be more 'masculine' than its conservative counterpart 'taberareru'. These results confirm that there is a certain degree of discrepancy between expressed attitudes and actual language uses, in term of gender distribution.

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