Abstract

From a social constructionist perspective, this paper examines speech-style shifts in academic consultation sessions between professors and students in Japanese universities and demonstrates that politeness is an interactional achievement. It has been argued that politeness in Japanese society is predominantly ‘discernment (wakimae)’, which differs from ‘volition (i. e., strategic politeness based on face needs)’ as proposed by Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987). This paper attempts to demonstrate that the dichotomy between the two types of politeness – ‘discernment’ and ‘volition’ – is irrelevant. It reanalyzes what was previously described as a display of ‘discernment’ as an active co-construction in which the grammatical structures and the sequential organization of talk serve as resources for the participants to construct their identities in the moment-by-moment unfolding of interaction.