Keigo in Modern Japan : Polite Language from Meiji to the Present

Patricia Wetzel在本書中全面介紹了日語中經常被討論但又被誤解的方面。 Keigo，或“禮貌的語言”，通常被視為日本語法的古老配飾和日本封建歷史的遺物。Wetzel認為，沒有什麼比事實更進一步了。確實，日本在社會地位、心理超脫、情感儲備以及許多其他依賴於背景因素的基礎上，在區分語言形式方面有著悠久的歷史。但是，正如在這個獨特而廣泛的框架研究中所表明的那樣，現代的keigo意識和keigo語法出現在日本與十九世紀中後期西方知識趨勢的相遇之中。現代日本Keigo對英語中沒有其他地方提供的keigo進行了細緻的語言和政治評論。

第一章概述了通過應用結構主義分析及其分支，西方語言學中keigo被問題化的方式。但是，keigo在英語文學中的存在並沒有開始與它在日本語言經典中佔據的地方相比。 Wetzel描述了keigo的歷史根源和成長以及使用手冊的流行程度，她認為，這些手冊不僅僅是公開教學，也不是強化人們已經相信的內容。

Patricia Wetzel offers in this volume a comprehensive examination of a frequently discussed yet much misunderstood aspect of the Japanese language. Keigo, or “polite language,” is often viewed as a quaint accessory to Japanese grammar and a relic of Japan’s feudal past. Nothing, Wetzel contends, could be further from the truth. It is true that Japan has a long history of differentiating linguistic form on the basis of social status, psychological detachment, emotional reserve, and a host of other context-dependent factors. But, as is made clear in this unique and broadly framed study, modern keigo consciousness and keigo grammar emerged out of Japan’s encounter with Western intellectual trends in the mid- to late nineteenth century. Keigo in Modern Japan presents a finely nuanced linguistic and political review of keigo available nowhere else in English.

The first chapter outlines the ways in which keigo has been problematized in Western linguistics through the application of structuralist analysis and its offshoots. But keigo’s presence in the English-language literature does not begin to compare with the place it occupies in the Japanese linguistic canon. Wetzel describes the historical roots and growth of keigo and the popularity of how-to manuals, which, she contends, are less about overt instruction than reinforcing what people already believe.

  Patricia J. Wetzel (Autor)

Publisher:University of Hawaii Press 

ISBN:    978-0824826024 

原價   US 45 台幣價 NT$1575