Honorific Basics

Core Meaning and Expressive Meaning

By コトバ君 ・ Japanese Honorifics ・ ~5 min read

Core Meaning and Expressive Meaning

Consider this sentence:

尊敬なさいません

sonkei nasaimasen

“I don’t respect you.”

This sentence uses addressee and referent honorifics to politely and respectfully communicate that the speaker does not respect the listener.

The fact that Japanese allows this kind of sentence shows that there are two layers of meaning here, existing independently from one another:

○ The first is Core meaning – the basic, conceptual meaning.

○ The second is Expressive meaning – the extra social colouring (distance, attitude, etc.)

Distinguishing between these two will be essential as we move deeper into the honorific system.

English also has words with the same Core meaning but different Expressive meaning such as,

talk vs prattle. Both have the same core meaning (to talk), but prattle has a negative expressive meaning that “talk” does not.

Same Core, Different Distance

Now we can understand how distance is stored in honorifics:

Hanasu 話す vs hanashimasu 話します

Both hanasu and hanashimasu share the same core meaning: “to talk,” but hanashimasu adds expressive meaning, specifically, horizontal distance.

Hanashimasu 話します vs ossharu おっしゃる

Both hanashimasu and ossharu share the same core meaning: “to talk,” but they have different expressive meanings. The expressive meaning of hanashimasu is horizontal distance, while the expressive meaning of ossharu is vertical distance.

Addressee and referent honorifics both add another layer of expressive meaning to the core meaning of a word of phrase. However, they create this distance in different directions: one vertical and one horizontal.

Distance can give rise to a wide range of secondary social meanings, depending on context.

So a key question to keep asking is: “Why this form now?”

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