A Persona-Based Analysis of Politeness in Japanese and Spanish

We present descriptive accounts of ‘politeness’ in Japanese and Spanish by analyzing Japanese subject- and addressee-honorifics and Spanish pronominal addressee forms. Our accounts focus on inter- and intra-speaker variation in the use of these expressions. Observing this variation, we ask the question of how expressive content interacts with context. We develop a model of Bayesian Dynamic Pragmatics [26], and propose an algorithm for how the use of a politeness-oriented marker contributes to the dynamic creation of the speaker’s persona or publicized self-image. Our model captures multiple pragmatic factors that impact politeness-usage and persona simultaneously. As such, it is designed to be extended and explain comparable phenomena in other languages that employ politeness-oriented expressions.