A statistical analysis of impressions of honorific expressions - dependence of honorific expressions on form

摘要

A typical honorific expression in Japanese uses the prefix “O" or "GO" and takes the form of "O + verb + ninaru" or "GO + verb + suru." Linguistic studies have indicated that the difference between the two forms is that the former uses a Japanese word (wago) for the verb and the latter a Chinese word (kango). However, there have hardly been any objective, quantitative studies made so far on this difference. We used Scheffe's pair comparison method to study the degree of politeness and formality and express numerically and analyze statistically various forms of honorific expressions. As a result, with regard to variation from normal expressions-for example, difference between the normal expressions of "tsukau" and "O-tsukaininaru"-tendency showed that the variation from the normal expressions with the prefix "0" increased more than those with the prefix "GO" in terms of both politeness and degree of formality.