Strategies employed by Japanese business practitioners on their job sites
What is it about?
This article examines data collected from an intra-organizational meeting in a Japanese company. It illustrates how, in a situation involving potential conflicts, Japanese managers’ code-switch between different linguistic variations in order to construct situational meaning. The interlocutors’ code-switch indicates constant vertical and horizontal change of their footing by sometimes strengthening solidarity with subordinates and mitigating potential face threatening acts (FTAs). The finding indicates that the use of honorifics and other social indexical forms in Japanese is not pre-determined by existing social conventions; rather it is subject to situational evaluation of the fluid local context where relationships are constructed and deconstructed.