SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This paper proposes the study of British English and Japanese conceptualizations of politeness by means of a measurement of the semantic domains which arguably constrain the expressive choices of speakers of these languages. Such measurement involves eliciting native speakers' similarity judgements of pairs of lexical items (metapragmatic judgements of attitudes and behaviours such as ‘polite’, ‘kind’ or ‘considerate’), mapping them onto bi-dimensional spaces, and interpreting the nature of the two principal dimensions held to contribute to the distribution of the items. These findings are compared with the results of previous works on this topic. Moreover, the paper discusses issues of methodology in the treatment of data relevant to analyses that attempt to link linguistic and cultural facts, and individual and cultural representations.