This thesis purports to introduce a cost and benefit theory of politeness which sheds light upon the politeness system in Japanese. This involves the assumption that a communicative act is a rational act, executed for a communicative goal. Given so, politeness-bearing language use is strategic in nature. This implies that using a certain strategy appropriate in a given communicative situation is a consequence of rationalization. With effective utilization of the cost and benefit concept, broadly defined, linguistic politeness is viewed as a negotiation between the speaker and the hearer on the basis of the speaker's assessment of cost and/or benefit. In order to achieve a characterization of negotiation, the underlying principle, referred to as "Politeness Negotiation Principles," is proposed. The primary task in this thesis is to analyze the use of sentence particles within a framework of the cost and benefit theory. While the majority of studies of politeness phenomena in Japanese have centered around honorifics, which is widely known for its highly developed system, sentence particles have received little attention. In this regard, this study of sentence particles shows a much broader vista of politeness phenomena in Japanese than hitherto assumed. The application of the cost and benefit concept goes beyond the sphere of politeness phenomena. By identifying a cost and/or a benefit involved in a context where the modality item desyoo/daroo and the anaphoric demonstratives sono and ano are employed, the uses of these elements, which reveal interesting dynamics of interaction between the speaker and the hearer, can be explained.

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The intent of this study is to examine the trajectory of ideology regarding standard Japanese and dialects from the historical perspective, and also to discuss the cause of the post-war shift of the ideology. Before the war, the government attempted to disseminate hyojun-go aiming at creating a unified Japan in the time when many countries were developing to be nation states after industrial revolution. After the Pacific war, the less strict-sounding term kyotsu-go was more often used, conveying an ideology of democratization. Yet despite the difference in the terms, speaking a common language continues to play a role of unifying the country. Today there is great interest in regional dialects in Japan. Although kyotsu-go is the common language, most people, especially in urban areas, are familiar with (if not fluent in) kyotsu-go. Due to the development of media and mobilization there are few people who cannot understand kyotsu-go. However, until around the 1970s people were more likely to believe in the superiority of standard Japanese (hyojun-go). Standard language was believed to be superior as a result of language policy that had its origins in Meiji and lasted through WWII. This included education policy that required school children to learn hyojun-go. After the war, in a process of democratization there emerged greater acceptance of language variety: dialect. Thus, there has been a shift in language ideology in Japan, and the people's interests in dialects is one indicator of this. This shift is analyzed here from the perspective of Bourdieu's notion of social and linguistic capital, tying it to policy, historical events and societal change.