Die feinen Unterschiede Zur sozialen Konstruktivität von Begrüßungsritualen im Japanischen unter formal Statusgleichen

Abstract

In the field of linguistic pragmatics, observational methods have been common during the last decades. This article presents the findings of a study on Japanese greeting rituals in which experimental methods were used. It aims at exploring the construction of social differences through forms of greetings between people of equal status. After developing the conceptual framework centred around the terms “ritual” and “contextualization” (Section 1), the article characterizes greetings as rituals (Section 2). It develops hypotheses for the influence of social categories on the choice of greeting patterns and sketches the experimental setup (Sections 3 and 4). After introducing the sample (Section 5), this paper identifies four different patterns of greeting rituals and explores the influence of the variables gender, ethnicity, social self-esteem and attractiveness on the choice of each of these patterns (Section 6). It turns out that gender – in various ways – has the strongest influence on the performance of greeting rituals but that also ethnicity and social self-esteem serve as important background variables. On the basis of these findings, the social constructiveness of the four different greeting rituals is discussed (Section 7).