Sic transit...: South Eastern Europe-Japan University Cooperation Network Student Forum

"Sic transit..." documents the proceedings of ‘South Eastern Europe-Japan University Cooperation Network Student Forum’ held at the University of Tsukuba in 2010. The proceedings comprise individual research papers as well as reports of the two discussion sessions and overall Forum evaluation. While the individual papers discuss issues from each researcher’s specific field of expertise under the Forum umbrella theme, the discussion sessions address a wide range of issues and problems concerning language and society from an essentially trans-disciplinary perspective. 要旨 "Sic transit..."（かくして...は過ぎ去る）は、2010年に筑波大学において開催された「南東欧・日本学生知的交流会議」の報告書です。本報告書は、個々の論文ならびに２つのディスカッション・セッション報告と学生会議に対する総評を収めています。各論文においては、統一テーマの枠内で、研究者が各自の専門領域から問題を論じているのに対して、２つのディスカッション・セッションにおいては、本質的に領域横断的な視点から、言語と社会に関する広範な論点と課題を取り上げています

Respect in Organizations: Feeling Valued as “We” and “Me”

Research suggests that organizational members highly prize respect but rarely report adequately receiving it. However, there is a lack of theory in organizational behavior regarding what respect actually is and why members prize it. We argue that there are two distinct types of respect: generalized respect is the sense that “we” are all valued in this organization, and particularized respect is the sense that the organization values “me” for particular attributes, behaviors, and achievements. We build a theoretical model of respect, positing antecedents of generalized respect from the sender’s perspective (prestige of social category, climate for generalized respect) and proposed criteria for the evaluation of particularized respect (role, organizational member, and character prototypicality), which is then enacted by the sender and perceived by the receiver. We also articulate how these two types of respect fulfill the receiver’s needs for belonging and status, which facilitates the self-related outcomes of organization-based self-esteem, organizational and role identification, and psychological safety. Finally, we consider generalized and personalized respect jointly and present four combinations of the two types of respect. We argue that the discrepancy between organizational members’ desired and received respect is partially attributable to the challenge of simultaneously enacting or receiving respect for both the “we” and the “me.

Politeness and paradigms of family: A perspective on the development of communicative competence in the Japanese ESL speaker

This thesis examines the issue of linguistic politeness in English with specific reference to Japanese ESL speakers. It develops a theoretical framework that sees shared assumptions concerning the marking of social-power and social-distance differentials as crucial. Developing the notion that linguistic politeness is a function of a status-dependent and context-dependent variety of language usage, it argues that there are four fundamental types of utterances, and that speech acts conforming to any of the power and distance configurations by means of which these four utterance types are defined can be considered to be polite if-but only if -both speaker and hearer have similar conceptions of their role-relationship within a given speech event. It argues further that perceptions of role-relationships -for both native speakers of Australian English and for Japanese ESL speakers-result from culturally codified understandings of family, and that these understandings provide the primary conceptual template for social actors manufacture and maintenance of social reality in extra-familial face-to-face interaction. As these conceptual templates are not congruent across cultures in the ways in which familial power and distance variables are codified, however, neither are the role-relationships in terms of which extra-familial social encounters are framed; and this, in tum, can lead to Japanese ESL speakers using politeness strategies in contextually inappropriate ways. From this theoretical perspective, the research uses a custom-designed interactive multimedia software package to compare choices of utterances with verified power and distance configurations made by Japanese ESL speakers with choices made by native speakers of Australian English in a variety of everyday speech situations

Helping instructors activate learners’ oral pragmatic competence in the L2 classroom

In this thesis, I address the lack of focus on what are the most common challenges that learners of Japanese experience in their oral interaction and the link between these challenges and their cause. I explore a number of pragmatic challenges that learners of Japanese as L2 encountered during their study abroad programmes or work placements in Japan. Following McKenney and Reeve’s (2012) model for conducting design-based research, the data draws on open-ended questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions with 57 learners of Japanese at two higher education institutions in Ireland to determine the challenges they encountered in their oral interaction with L1 speakers. The challenges which present themselves in the data are examined through Relevance Theory, a cognitive-pragmatic approach that is somewhat unexplored in interlanguage pragmatics research. I demonstrate that challenges at the production and interpretation level arise due to difficulties in decoding and inference of implicit and explicit aspects of communication. These challenges are the result of current instructional practices in the L2 classroom, where there is an excessive focus on linguistic input, an unawareness of learners’ own pragmatic competence and a lack of inferential processes being taught. The findings lend support to the need to enhance pragmatic competence among L2 learners through domain-specific cognitive processes. I argue that ideas developed in Relevance Theory can be particularly beneficial to the teaching and learning of pragmatics in the L2 classroom, in particular for oral interaction. I present a four-process pedagogical framework to help instructors activate learners’ pragmatic competence. This pedagogical framework is based on Ifantidou’s (2014) definition of pragmatic competence. I also outline general guidelines and concrete activities for L2 instructors to help narrow the gap between linguistic form and proposition expressed as well as enhance learners’ production and interpretation of both explicit and implicit meanin

2015 Abstract Booklet

Complete Schedule of Events for the 17th Annual Undergraduate Research Symposium at Minnesota State University, Mankato

European Approaches to Japanese Language and Linguistics

In this volume European specialists of Japanese language present new and original research into Japanese over a wide spectrum of topics which include descriptive, sociolinguistic, pragmatic and didactic accounts. The articles share a focus on contemporary issues and adopt new approaches to the study of Japanese that often are specific to European traditions of language study. The articles address an audience that includes both Japanese Studies and Linguistics. They are representative of the wide range of topics that are currently studied in European universities, and they address scholars and students alike

A synchronic and diachronic study of Korean modal suffixes.

This functional typological study of the Korean Modal Suffixes intends to establish a rather comprehensive picture of the Korean modal suffixes (hereafter KMS). It employs diachronic and synchronic approaches assuming that synchronic rules reflect the diachronic development of the KMS. It also traces the development of the KMS from the point of view of their interaction with tense and aspect. Chapter one gives a general overview of the whole work. Chapter two surveys previous studies on modality both from a general point of view and with regard to Korean and presents a preliminary account of the KMS. Chapter three deals with the Typological characteristics of the KMS. It establishes the suffixation rule, which presupposes that if there exist morphologically distinctive classes, there should be places of occurrence for the respective items which give automatic clues for their identification. Chapter four is concerned with the semantic features of the KMS. A number of semantic parameters of the system have been accounted for, and definitions of sub-categories and formulations are proposed on a conceptual basis (Palmer 1986). This thesis is also dedicated to the description of the polysemous character of the KMS and to the establishment of the principle which governs the expansion of meanings, the cause and nature of semantic change in terms of a compromise between the two approaches - prototype and componential semantic theories (Bennett 1990; Taylor 1995). In the course of presenting a classification of their meanings, it emphasizes their polysemous nature and gives prominence to the distinction between deontic and epistemic uses. Chapter five explores the historical development of the KMS. The assumption that what might have started as a context-dependent extension acquires the status of an established prototypical sense is applied to a representative set of Middle and Old Korean etymologies. The principles of change are accounted for from a grammaticalization perspective (Hopper & Traugott 1993). Chapter six summarizes the original contributions of this thesis