Looking up to others: Social status, Chinese honorifics, and spatial attention.

Two experiments were carried out to investigate whether social status encoded in Chinese honorifics has metaphorical effects on up-down spatial orientation. In Experiment 1, participants judged whether a word was an elevating or denigrating term immediately prior to judging whether an arrow was pointing up or down. Arrow orientation was identified faster when its direction was congruent with the perceived social status of the preceding honorific (e.g., elevating word and up arrow). In Experiment 2, participants identified the letter p or q after judging whether honorifics were elevating or denigrating terms. Letters were identified faster when placed at the top of the screen following elevating terms, and faster at the bottom following denigrating terms. These results suggest that the mere activation of social status differences by honorific terms orients attention toward schema-congruent space. Social status appears to have pragmatic effects, not only for lexical decision-making, but also in where Chinese speakers are most likely to look.Keywords: embodied cognition, metaphor, pragmatics, priming, spatial attention(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)According to Brown and Levinson (1987), honorifics are direct grammatical encodings of the relative social status of speakers, which are used to convey esteem or respect when used in addressing or referring to a person. Because honorifics denote higher social status of the addressee, their use mitigates a potential threat to the addressee's negative face (Brown & Levinson, 1987). For example, before a question is asked, a Chinese speaker would say things such as qingwen [...] (excuse me) or laojia [...] (excuse me). Clearly these expressions are used to soften the verbal request that follows, and are used as a negative politeness strategy.Focusing on normative or canonical usage of honorifics, some scholars (Hill et al., 1986; Ide, 2006) propose that politeness does not relate primarily to individual volition (i.e., politeness strategies), but is anchored in wakimae, the "discernment" embodied in the speaker's behaviour based on social norms (Ide, 2006). A speaker of an Asian language (e.g., Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) is required to evaluate and acknowledge his or her sense of place in a given context based on social rules regarding hierarchy, power, age, and occasion (e.g., formal vs. informal). Accordingly, a speaker who has internalized social rules must employ honorific forms when interacting with an addressee of higher status or one who is more powerful or older, and when interacting in a formal setting. In this regard, the choice of honorifics in the theory of wakimae is sociopragmatically governed by social conventions. Obviously, the claim that the primary mode of interaction in Asian society is discernment partly stems from the underlying assumption that honorifics are a direct index of politeness oriented to the relative social status of the speaker, addressee, or referent. Although Ide (2006) and Brown and Levinson (1987) disagree about whether the use of honorifics reflects individual volitional strategies or conforming to social norms, they both believe that there is a close relationship between social status and honorifics.Recently, however, there have been challenges to claims that there is a one-to-one mapping between honorifics and social status. It has been claimed that in actual usage the social meanings of honorifics are not fixed across varied social contexts (e.g., Agha, 2007; Dunn, 2005; Strauss & Eun, 2005). For example, it is not always possible to predict that a lower-status speaker chooses an honorific form when speaking to a higher status addressee, or that the speaker may not use an honorific form consistently to the same addressee in the same setting (e.g., Okamoto, 1997). That is, the use of honorifics and plain forms is not strictly informed by social norms or social rules, but rather, their use is more diverse and context-bound, and hence reflects more than sociocultural status (e. …