This article explores indexical relations between honorific forms and their situational meanings by examining the Japanese addressee honorific masu form and its nonhonorific counterpart, the plain form. Arguing against a simple view of these forms as speech‐level markers, the article proposes that both addressee‐deference and speaker‐focused self‐presentation are indexical values of the masu form; the plain form is associated with an absence of these values. By examining two contrastive social situations, the article investigates ways in which co‐occurring contextual features foreground one value over the other.

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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.

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