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The semantics and sociopragmatics of the Japanese honorific titles san, kun, and chan: some focal points of variation

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Abstract

This work discusses the semantics, pragmatic effects, and usage of the three “honorific titles” in Japanese, san, kun, and chan, which constitute an important aspect of the social-deictic system, as well as of the inventory of person-reference strategies, of the language. All three items are honorific expressions attached to a name. It will be argued that kun and chan convey a lower degree of respect than san does, and that due to this feature, they (i) often signal intimacy and endearment (without conventionally encoding such information) and (ii) are usually preferentially applied, instead of san, to children. It will also be proposed that there are two variants each of kun and chan, one unmarked and one marked. While the unmarked variety of kun is applied exclusively to male referents, the marked variety is neutral as to the referent’s gender but instead conveys that the speaker and the referent stand in a relation of colleagueship in a broad sense. As for chan, while its unmarked variety indicates that the referent is a child or a female, the marked variety lacks this feature.

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Notes

  1. Subscript s indicates a surname; subscript m and f indicate a given name referring to male and a female respectively. The subscript abbreviations in glosses are: Acc \(=\) accusative, AddrHon \(=\) addressee(-oriented) honorific, Attr \(=\) attributive, BenAux \(=\) benefactive auxiliary, BenPsvAux \(=\) benefactive-passive auxiliary, Cop \(=\) copula, Dat \(=\) dative, DAux \(=\) discourse auxiliary, DP \(=\) discourse particle, EvidAux \(=\) evidential auxiliary, EvidP \(=\) evidential particle, F \(=\) given name of a female, Gen \(=\) genitive, Ger \(=\) gerund, Imp \(=\) imperative, Inf \(=\) infinitive, Intj \(=\) interjection, M \(=\) given name of a male, Neg \(=\) negation, NegAux \(=\) negative auxiliary, Nom \(=\) nominative, NpfvAux \(=\) non-perfective auxiliary, PossHon \(=\) possessor honorific, Prov \(=\) provisional, Prs \(=\) present, Pst \(=\) past, Psup \(=\) presumptive, Psv \(=\) passive, SHon \(=\) subject(-oriented) honorific, Sn \(=\) surname, Th \(=\) thematic wa (topic/ground marker), Top \(=\) topic marker, Vol \(=\) volitional.

  2. San, kun, and chan may also be used with a common noun or the name of an organization, as in (i), or form a nickname with a part of a surname or given name, as in (ii).

    1. (i)

       

      1. a.

        [bengoshi ‘lawyer’ \(+\) san] ‘lawyer, Mr./Ms. Lawyer’

      2. b.

        [Tokyo Daigaku ‘The University of Tokyo’ \(+\) san] ‘The University of Tokyo’

      3. c.

        [o (honorific prefix) \(+\) sumoo ‘sumo’ \(+\) san] ‘(the) sumo wrestler’

      4. d.

        [megane ‘glasses’ \(+\) kun] ‘(the) guy with glasses’ (somewhat pejorative)

      5. e.

        [kuma ‘bear’ \(+\) chan] ‘(the) stuffed bear’ (in child language)

    2. (ii)

       

      1. a.

        Yanagiba\(_s\) \(+\) san \(\Rightarrow \) Gibasan

      2. b.

        Atsushi\(_m\) \(+\) kun \(\Rightarrow \) Akkun

      3. c.

        Noriko\(_f\) \(+\) chan \(\Rightarrow \) Norichan, Nonchan

    The semantic contributions of san/kun/chan in such combinations vary a great deal, from being fairly transparent to being highly idiomatic. This work focuses on san/kun/chan following a (complete) name.

  3. It has been a matter of debate whether Japanese has personal pronouns as a grammatical category; see, e.g., Sugamoto (1989), Takubo (1997:13), and Frellesvig (2010: 245–246).

  4. The ADTs sama and shi (see (7)) too could be applied to wide ranges of people, but they are by and large confined to certain formal registers.

  5. Expressions in small capitals refer to lexemes.

  6. An alternative label here is “conventionally implicature”. It must be noted, however, that this term has been used in various ways by different authors.

  7. Oshima (2019) discusses that some referents may be assigned, and some honorifics—called negative honorifics or dishonorifics—encode, honorific values smaller than 0. The issue of negative honorification is not directly relevant to the purposes of the current work, and will be put aside.

  8. The principle of Reverence Maximization formulated in (11) incorporates the effects of the two discourse principles posited by Oshima (2019, 2021):

    1. (i)

       

      1. a.

        Reverence Maximization (Content): For any utterance u, each lexical item (word or multi-word unit) i involved in u must be chosen in such a way that i, among its honorific variants, expresses the highest degrees of reverence toward (i) the addressee of u and (ii) the referents mentioned or evoked in u that do not exceed what they deserve.

      2. b.

        Reverence Maximization (Form): For any utterance u, each lexical item (word or multi-word unit) i involved in u must be chosen in such a way that i, among its honorific variants, expresses reverence toward (i) the addressee of u and (ii) the referents mentioned or evoked in u with the largest number of honorific feature types without expressing a degree of reverence that exceeds what they deserve.

  9. https://questant.jp/ (checked on July 12, 2021)

  10. An anonymous reviewer notes that the pattern in (20b)—the combination of second-person reference with kun and a polite verb—is found in certain settings, such as when a college professor is talking to a male student in a classroom. One way to account for this is to suppose that for some speakers, in some settings, kun can be associated with as high a minimum honorific value as san is. See also Note 14.

  11. It is worth noting that something similar happens with kinship-based ADTs and name substitutes. Let’s take the case of “aunt”. It that is common for a nephew or niece not to apply any honorifics to their blood-related aunt, when talking to or about her. It is the norm, on the other hand, for them to choose a term encoding her aunthood when referring to her. Auntie Hiroko is typically referred to by her nieces and nephews as (Hiroko) {obasan/obachan}, rather than Hiroko (san/chan). This practice, like the possible preference of kyooju ‘professor’ to san, cannot be reduced to the matter of honorification.

  12. The following quote, from a column posted on a job matching website for kindergarten teachers, provides anecdotal evidence.

    figure ad

  13. Honorific values can be approximated as sums of the weighted measurements of the three factors, as in (i) (cf. McCready 2019: 28–30).

    1. (i)

      Hon(x) \(=\) (a \(\times \) (Rank(x) − Rank(Speaker))) \(+\) (b \(\times \) Distance(Speaker, x)) \(+\) (c \(\times \) Formality) (a, b, and c are constants weighting the three factors)

    I hasten to emphasize, however, that this is but a very crude approximation. There are additional factors that affect the honorific value of a referent, including (i) discourse topics and situations (e.g. whether the conversation is about the referent’s health issues or extramarital affairs, whether the speaker has been helping out or being helped out by the referent), (ii) the relationship between the addressee and the referent, and (iii) the personality (or persona) of the speaker (Kikuchi 1997: 42–76, 127–130). Also, the “constants” may not be constant across the board—e.g., some speakers might care more about relative rank than other speakers do.

  14. In some communities of sport players (notably soccer players) and pop artists, it is customary for male junior members to apply kun to (at least some) male senior members, while using polite verbs when talking to them (see also Note 10). This practice, however, is perceived as peculiar by speakers outside these communities, lending support to the supposition that generally reference with kun implicates that the speaker assigns a fairly low honorific value to the referent. One way to account for the described atypical usage of kun is to suppose that, in a small range of registers, there is a variant of kun that has a non-proffered meaning along the lines of (i) (in addition to the regular variant).

    1. (i)

      0.2 \(\le \) HON(\(\alpha \)) < 0.4 & male(\(\alpha \)) & groupmate(Speaker, \(\alpha \))

    The postulated meaning captures the intuition that for those speakers who apply kun to senior groupmates, san still is a more respectful ADT than kun (a groupmate who is much older than the speaker is likely referred to with san rather than kun).

    Another type of marked usage of kun is seen at the National Diet and some local government assemblies. There, members customarily address each other with kun in sessions of their respective House or assembly, regardless of their age, gender, and position (chairperson, minister, etc.). Again, this is generally perceived as a curious custom.

  15. Throughout the paper, examples that are taken or adapted from naturally occurring texts are marked with the dagger symbol (\(\dag \)) at the end, and their sources will be provided in “Appendix II”.

  16. The data reported by Ozaki (2001), where the factor of the speaker’s gender does not clearly correlate with whether (s)he applies kun to his/her female classmates, do not conform to this characterization. This might reflect somewhat idiosyncratic practices of (some of) the communities on which the survey was conducted.

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Acknowledgements

Part of this work was presented at Logic and Engineering of Natural Language Semantics 18, held online in November 2021, and at The 35th Workshop of Contrastive Studies of Foreign Languages and Japanese, organized by the International Center for Japanese Studies, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies and held online in March 2022. I would like to thank the audiences there, as well as the JEAL reviewers and editors for valuable comments. This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 21K18359.

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  1. Graduate School of Humanities, Nagoya University, Furo-cho, Chikusa-ku, Nagoya, 464-8601, Japan

    David Y. Oshima

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Appendices

Appendix I: The web-based survey

The survey was conducted using Questant, a web-based questionnaire platform administered by Macromill, Inc.

1.1 I.1 Questionnaire

The questionnaire consisted of 34 multiple-choice questions of the following form:

figure av

The respondents were asked to answer these questions by selecting all items that apply from (ii) below, or selecting “Not Applicable” (which is to be chosen when the respondent does not have or recall relevant experiences).

figure aw

The combinations of [TIME/SETTING] and [PEOPLE] are as in Table 6.

Table 6 The 34 combinations of TIME/SETTING and PEOPLE
Full size table

1.2 I.2 Respondents/responses

The respondents were recruited through the platform for a fee, from the panel of respondents organized by GMO Research, Inc. and consisting solely of residents of Japan. The respondents received a small amount of monetary reward, out of the paid fee, for their participation.

A total of 1102 responses were collected, among which 151 were weeded out on suspicion of being careless or insincere. The responses (\(n = 951\)) were accompanied by the information concerning the sex and age group of the respondent. The breakdown is given in Table 7.

Table 7 The respondents’ information
Full size table

Appendix II: The sources of the examples taken or adapted from naturally occurring texts

(32) Oishinbo, vol.1 by Tetsu Kariya and Akira Hanasaki, published by Shogakukan in 1984; (33) Doobutsu no oisha san, vol.1 by Noriko Sasaki, published by Kodansha in 1988; (34) Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese (BCCWJ; LBi6_00007:1570–2140). Originally from Uso happyaku, kore demo ka!!!! by Yukichi Amano, published by Bungei Shunjuu in 1994; (36) BCCWJ (LBo9_00016:16860–17170). Originally from Ingetsu no kaja by Kei Shimojima, published by Shogakukan in 2000; (37) BCCWJ (LBg9_00193:34380–34750). Originally from Ningyoo tachi no isu by Jiro Akagawa, published by The Asahi Shimbun Company in 1989; (38) BCCWJ (OB1X_00097:23300–23440). Originally from Tooga by Hiroyuki Itsuki, published by Bungei Shunjuu in 1976; (41) Kachoo Shima Koosaku, vol.1 by Kenshi Hirokane, published by Kodansha in 1985; (42) Saigo no jidoosha ron by Reiichiro Fukuno, published by Soyosha in 2005.

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Oshima, D.Y. The semantics and sociopragmatics of the Japanese honorific titles san, kun, and chan: some focal points of variation. J East Asian Linguist 32, 169–200 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10831-023-09255-9

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