Japanese conversations are known to contain a large amount of unexpressed information. When a speaker speaks with elliptical information, he or she assumes that the addressee will understand what is not overtly expressed based on the knowledge that is supposed to be shared textually, personally or culturally. The addressee, on the other hand, must determine what is not being expressed overtly using such shared knowledge. At the heart of this kind of communication is the existence of trust assumed among the interlocutors. Using the term ‘entrustment’, we will examine how one particular Japanese formulaic construction, [ Noun (da) yo Noun], ‘It’s Noun, you know, Noun’, indexes mutual trust to manage conversational interaction. We will argue that this meta-pragmatic awareness needs to be recognized beyond surface interactional patterns identified in conversation.
This study investigates native Japanese speakers’ context-dependent linguistic knowledge of cooking recipes.
Recipes are a typical example of a register, defined as the use of language in a particular social situation for a specific
purpose. Thirty participants in the present study were asked to write a recipe for curry rice (a popular dish in Japan) or an
unnamed soup (shown in a photo) on a blank piece of paper without access to any resources. Most participants’ texts contained
specialized vocabulary and basic procedural organization. On the other hand, few integrated the typical grammatical features of
commercial recipes. It suggests that the latter details are not part of the communicative repertoires of most participants. The
grammatical characteristics of commercial recipes are likely a product of careful editing, aimed for clarity and consistency.
Professional editing appears to have a significant role in shaping the grammar of the written register.
This paper investigates multimodal strategies for balancing formality and informality online. The analysis of 300 comment-reply interactions on a recipe sharing site in Japan demonstrates that writers tend to avoid being overly formal or informal in their messages. For example, most comments and replies are written in polite forms but many incorporate some plain forms and colloquial expressions. Linguistic features, however, are not the only way through which the writers manage an appropriate level of formality and informality. The study examines the role of kaomoji or Japanese-style emoticons for socio-relational work online. Some kaomoji function locally as cues for interpreting the sentences featuring kaomoji. All kaomoji, including those with local functions, work to enhance the social presence of the writers on the screen via pictographic gaze and gestures, which increases the perception of intimate rapport. The findings underscore the importance of a multimodal perspective in examining how people handle social relationships online.
This article aims to expand the concept of fixedness in language from stable autonomous structures to socially shared patterns of communication. The study examined conversational utterances that sounded strange or ‘unnatural’ to members of a speech community and explored the reasons behind such intuitive perceptions. Some of these utterances contradicted the community members’ expectations based on sedimented patterns of linguistic resources of various sizes and associated conventional meanings beyond dictionary definitions (i.e. cognitive frame). Others challenged their expectations concerning positional fitness and socio-relational concerns (i.e. interactional frame). The observed expectations for sedimented patterns of communication likely result from a lifetime of experience talking and hearing about the world around them in ways that are accepted by other members of the speech community. The dynamic perspective on fixedness is particularly meaningful for context-dependent languages like Japanese that rely heavily on unexpressed shared knowledge in co-constructing meanings and actions.
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