How does one come to understand the concept and role of intimate exaltation — especially intimate exaltation in Japanese — if one does not speak Japanese or live in Japan? One place to start:
“Speech-style shifts and intimate exaltation in Japanese,” Yoko Hasegawa, Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 269-284, 2002. The author [pictured here] is Professor of Japanese Linguistics in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California.
Professor Hasegawa has also written about “Soliloquy as an index of intimate exaltation“.