Politeness, the Japanese style: an investigation into the use of honorific forms and people’s attitudes towards such use

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Luton for the degree of Doctor of PhilosophyThe main purpose of the thesis is to explore the characteristics of politeness which are conveyed by the use of Japanese honorific forms (i.e honorific politeness). The perspective of the research is as follows: 1) the concept of politeness is regarded as being wider in scope than in major past studies of linguistic politeness in the West (e.g Leech 1983); 2) unlike many past studies of politeness related to Japanese honorific fonns, the research attempts to study the social effect of the use of an honorific form rather than the grammatical or semantic properties of such forms; 3) the analysis of honorific politeness is based on the findings about the mechanism by which honorific politeness mitigates discomfitlrre, and on the metalinguistic evaluations of honorific [om1s made by native speakers. Results from a questionnaire, which investigated the types of discomfiture which result from various kinds of inappropriate linguistic behaviom, suggested that the lise of an honorific form can mitigate two main types of discomfitme, which differ in degree of seriousness, depending on the social features of the situation in which the use occms. It is pointed out that the mitigation of either type of discomfiture should be regarded as flowing from a common type of linguistic choice, that is, compliance with a social nom1 goveming the appropriate use oflanguage in different kinds of communication situations, i.e. register rules. Furthermore, based on observations of the use of linguistic forms other than honorific ones, it is argued that honorific forms are one of many linguistic devices for realizing register differences, i.e. register markers. Results from the other questionnaire, which probed native speaker's evaluation of different types of language use for the communication of politeness, indicate that native speakers tend to place special aesthetic value on honorific forms and their use, independently of the seriousness of the discomfiture they can mitigate. Based on an analysis of the background to this tendency, it is argued that the value can be appropriately regarded as sharing many properties with the value which language users place on a certain part of register markers in a diglossic conmmunity. It is thus concluded that honorific politeness is a form of diglossia

Irony in a second language: exploring the comprehension of Japanese speakers of English

This thesis focuses on the extent to which non-native speakers of English understand potentially ironic utterances in a similar way to native speakers. Barbe (1995: 4) sees irony as one of ‘the final obstacles before achieving near native-speaker fluency.’ This assumption is supported by the findings of earlier studies (Bouton 1999, Lee 2002; Manowong 2011; Yamanaka 2003) which assumed a Gricean framework seeing irony as communicating the ‘opposite of what is said’ (Grice 1975, 1978). This thesis adopts instead the relevance-theoretic account of irony as echoic (Sperber and Wilson 1995; Wilson and Sperber 2012), arguing that previous work suffers from both problematic theoretical assumptions and flawed experimental methods. The thesis reports the findings of two experiments designed to examine similarities and differences between the responses of non-native speakers of English (here Japanese speakers) and native speakers and how similar or different the effects of prosody are for these groups. The first experiment, conducted by an online survey, provided surprising results, suggesting that Japanese speakers can respond to potentially ironical utterances similarly to native speakers. The second experiment, focusing on the effects of prosody, compared the groups with regard to response trends. Three prosodic contours were used in this study, labelled ‘basic’ (a kind of default, unmarked tone), ‘deadpan’ (with a narrower pitch range), and ‘exaggerated’ (with a wider pitch range). The results indicated that Japanese participants could perceive English prosodic structure in similar ways to native speakers and were affected by prosodic contours in similar ways. It also suggested that Japanese participants were affected less strongly by ‘exaggerated’ intonation and slightly more strongly by ‘deadpan’ tones. These findings suggest that a relevance-theoretic framework provides the means to carry out fuller investigations than carried out previously and to develop a more systematic explanation of the understanding of irony in a second language

Proceedings 2016: Selected papers from the twentieth college-wide conference for students in languages, linguistics & literature

"Celebrating Voices - past • present • future": Selected papers from the annual college-wide conference for students in languages, linguistics & literature at the College of Languages, Linguistics & Literature, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa (2016).Selected papers from the annual college-wide conference for students in languages, linguistics & literature at the College of Languages, Linguistics & Literature, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.Support for the conference was provided by the UH College of Language, Linguistics & Literature and the National Foreign Language Resource Cente

Children's Competence with Listener Dependent Prosodic Modifications

A key component of communicative development is learning that different listeners are spoken to in different ways. Mature communicators not only adjust what they say when addressing children versus adults, for example, but they also adjust the manner in which they speak. The purpose of this dissertation is to explore school-aged children’s knowledge about the kinds of adjustments that speakers make to their prosody depending on who their listener is. Prosodic aspects of speech are those which pertain to pitch, volume, and speech rate. Study 1 (Experiment A) explored the relative strength of prosody and semantic content in 5- to 10-year-old children’s decisions about the intended listener of greetings. In incongruent conditions, in which the prosody of the greeting suggested one listener (i.e., either an infant or an adult) and the content another, 5- to 6-year-old children’s choices indicated confusion about whom to choose, while 7- to 10-year-old children used prosody to choose the intended listener of the greeting. Experiment B showed that adults were similarly influenced by prosodic rather than content cues. In these ways, Study 1 highlighted older children and adults’ associations of speaker prosody with particular types of listeners (even in the face of conflicting content cues). Relatedly, Study 2 explored the kinds of social and communication-related judgments that adults (Experiment C) and children (Experiment D) made about speakers and listeners when the speaker’s prosody was appropriately tailored to her listener (i.e., child-directed prosody for a child) versus inappropriately tailored to her listener (i.e., adult-directed prosody for a child). When making judgments about a range of socio-communicative qualities, Experiment C showed that adults considered whether the prosodic style was appropriate for the listener when assessing competence. In contrast, Experiment D showed that 7- to 10-year-old children did not penalize interlocutors when there was a prosodic mismatch between speaker and listener. Rather, children showed a strong preference for child-directed prosody generally, which extended throughout their competence ratings. Results from these two sets of studies have theoretical implications as well as implications for the remediation of social and communicative deficits

Proceedings of the VIIth GSCP International Conference

The 7th International Conference of the Gruppo di Studi sulla Comunicazione Parlata, dedicated to the memory of Claire Blanche-Benveniste, chose as its main theme Speech and Corpora. The wide international origin of the 235 authors from 21 countries and 95 institutions led to papers on many different languages. The 89 papers of this volume reflect the themes of the conference: spoken corpora compilation and annotation, with the technological connected fields; the relation between prosody and pragmatics; speech pathologies; and different papers on phonetics, speech and linguistic analysis, pragmatics and sociolinguistics. Many papers are also dedicated to speech and second language studies. The online publication with FUP allows direct access to sound and video linked to papers (when downloaded)

Individual mentalizing ability boosts flexibility toward a linguistic marker of social distance: An ERP investigation

Sentence-final particles (SFPs) as bound morphemes in Japanese have no obvious effect on the truth conditions of a sentence. However, they encompass a diverse range of usages, from typical to atypical, according to the context and the interpersonal relationships in the specific situation. The most frequent particle,-ne, is typically used after addressee-oriented propositions for information sharing, while another frequent particle,-yo, is typically used after addresser-oriented propositions to elicit a sense of strength. This study sheds light on individual differences among native speakers in flexibly understanding such linguistic markers based on their mentalizing ability (i.e., the ability to infer the mental states of others). Two experiments employing electroencephalography (EEG) consistently showed enhanced early posterior negativities (EPN) for atypical SFP usage compared to typical usage, especially when understanding-ne compared to -yo, in both an SFP appropriateness judgment task and a content comprehension task. Importantly, the amplitude of the EPN for atypical usages of-ne was significantly higher in participants with lower mentalizing ability than in those with a higher mentalizing ability. This effect plausibly reflects low-ability mentalizers' stronger sense of strangeness toward atypical-ne usage. While high-ability mentalizers may aptly perceive others' attitudes via their various usages of-ne, low-ability mentalizers seem to adopt a more stereotypical understanding. These results attest to the greater degree of difficulty low-ability mentalizers have in establishing a smooth regulation of interpersonal distance during social encounters

Explicitness and ellipsis as features of conversational style in British English and Ecuadorian Spanish

In this article I examine differences in conversational style between British English and Ecuadorian Spanish which can be the source of communication conflict among speakers of these two languages in telephone conversations, and, presumably in other types of interaction. I look at the language of mediated and non-mediated telephone conversations and examine one feature that interacts with indirectness, i.e., the degree of explicitness participants employ to realize similar acts or moves in the two languages. In non-mediated telephone interactions both British English and Ecuadorian Spanish speakers appear to display a preference for the use of explicitness in formulating various telephone management moves. On the other hand, in mediated interactions, while the British appear to favour explicitness, Ecuadorians in the present study, make use of elliptical forms. The latter, however, tend to be accompanied by deference markers. Differences in the use of explicit and elliptical utterances are interpreted as reflecting that, in certain types of interactions, Ecuadorians favour a style that can be characterized as fast and deferential, but possibly rather abrupt to the English, whereas the latter appear to favour a less hurried style which emphasizes the expression of consideration rather than deference

Exploring Speech Technologies for Language Learning

The teaching of the pronunciation of any foreign language must encompass both segmental and suprasegmental aspects of speech. In computational terms, the two levels of language learning activities can be decomposed at least into phonemic aspects, which include the correct pronunciation of single phonemes and the co-articulation of phonemes into higher phonological units; as well as prosodic aspects which include  the correct position of stress at word level;  the alternation of stress and unstressed syllables in terms of compensation and vowel reduction;  the correct position of sentence accent;  the generation of the adequate rhymth from the interleaving of stress, accent, and phonological rules;  the generation of adequate intonational pattern for each utterance related to communicative functions; As appears from above, for a student to communicate intelligibly and as close as possible to native-speaker's pronunciation, prosody is very important [3]. We also assume that an incorrect prosody may hamper communication from taking place and this may be regarded a strong motivation for having the teaching of Prosody as an integral part of any language course. From our point of view it is much more important to stress the achievement of successful communication as the main objective of a second language learner rather than the overcoming of what has been termed “foreign accent”, which can be deemed as a secondary goal. In any case, the two goals are certainly not coincident even though they may be overlapping in some cases. We will discuss about these matter in the following sections. All prosodic questions related to “rhythm” will be discussed in the first section of this chapter. In [4] the author argues in favour of prosodic aids, in particular because a strong placement of word stress may impair understanding from the listener’s point of view of the word being pronounced. He also argues in favour of acquiring correct timing of phonological units to overcome the impression of “foreign accent” which may ensue from an incorrect distribution of stressed vs. unstressed stretches of linguistic units such as syllables or metric feet. Timing is not to be confused with speaking rate which need not be increased forcefully to give the impression of a good fluency: trying to increase speaking rate may result in lower intelligibility. The question of “foreign accent” is also discussed at length in (Jilka M., 1999). This work is particularly relevant as far as intonational features of a learner of a second language which we will address in the second section of this chapter. Correcting the Intonational Foreign Accent (hence IFA) is an important component of a Prosodic Module for self-learning activities, as categorical aspects of the intonation of the two languages in contact, L1 and L2 are far apart and thus neatly distinguishable. Choice of the two languages in contact is determined mainly by the fact that the distance in prosodic terms between English and Italian is maximal, according to (Ramus, F. and J. Mehler, 1999; Ramus F., et al., 1999)