Japanese politeness in the work of Fujio Minami

This article presents and evaluates the work on linguistic politeness of the Japanese linguist Minami Fujio. It also constitutes a critical introduction to the work "Keigo" [Honorifics] translated by B. Pizziconi in the second article appearing in the same volume

Post-Fukushima discourses on nuclear power in Japan

The critical damage to the Fukushima nuclear plant, triggered by the unprecedented earthquake and tsunami of 11 March, caused radioactive contamination to a vast area and large-scale evacuation. Both its short- and long-term consequences are still relatively unclear. But together with nuclear debris, the explosions at Fukushima blew up a few myths: the myth of cleanness, that of safety, and the myth of cheapness, which decades of propaganda had successfully created and maintained. I offer a few observations on the nature of the response and the discursive positioning of various social actors in the weeks and months following the disaster, from the pro-nuclear camp of government and electricity companies to the anti-nuclear grass-root movements, intellectuals and artists, and the fora of the official news media and social media. On the one hand, I note how the (mis)handling of information in the wake of the Fukushima disaster through official or institutional channels shook the public consciousness and reignited big political issues such as the public 19s right to information, the question of authority over specialized (scientific) information, issues of accountability etc. (i.e. ultimately, issues of democracy); and on the other I ask whether new forms of communication such as the internet and the social media actually provide alternative instruments for challenging or even subverting the existing relations of power

Japanese vocabulary development in Study Abroad: the timing of the year abroad in a language degree curriculum

This paper reports the results of a study of vocabulary development by learners of Japanese, during a year abroad in Japan. The particular feature of this study is that it compares the performance of two cohorts, studying in the same UK university and in degrees in Japanese, in which the period of study abroad is undertaken at different points of the degree — respectively in year 2 and year 3. Their performance is compared at three points in time: before and after the period of study abroad, and one year after return. The group going to Japan at a lower proficiency level (i.e. study abroad in year 2) appears to benefit more in terms of absolute gains (although the two groups appear to perform rather similarly when their potential gains, i.e. gains against the test’s ceiling, are considered). The two groups’ gains in the following year are considerably smaller than during the period abroad but remarkably similar to each other; however, these gains take place at different instructional levels. The implications are discussed for the timing of periods of study abroad in BA programmes

Modal Markers in Japanese: A Study of Learners’ Use before and after Study Abroad

Japanese discourse requires speakers to index, in a relatively explicit manner, their stance toward the propositional information as well as the hearer. This is done, among other things, by means of a grammaticalized set of modal markers. Although previous research suggests that the use of modal expressions by second language learners differs from that of native users, little is known about “typical” native or non-native behavior. This study aims (a) to delineate native and non-native usage by a quantitative examination of a broad range of Japanese modal categories, and qualitative analyses of a subset of potentially problematic categories among them, and (b) to identify possible developmental trajectories, by means of a longitudinal observation of learners’ verbal production before and after study abroad in Japan. We find that modal categories realized by non- transparent or non-salient markers (e.g., explanatory modality no da, or utterance modality sentence-final particles) pose particular challenges in spite of their relatively high availability in the input, and we discuss this finding in terms of processing constraints that arguably affect learners’ acquisition of the grammaticalized modal markers

Indexicality and (im)politeness

This chapter argues that frameworks that address the indexical properties of natural language provide a unified and coherent account of diverse phenomena that are crucial to the study of (im)politeness. Studies of indexicality have typically explored deictic systems, of which honorifics are but a subset (‘social deixis’), but have also addressed the semiotic potential of linguistic resources, i.e. the meanings generated by co-textual and contextual relations. An approach focusing on indexicality therefore provides a paradigm that theorizes the link between linguistic phenomena and typical concerns of (im)politeness research such as self- and other-evaluation and positioning, registers, or sociolinguistic variation. Additionally, this chapter argues that a socioculturally oriented indexical approach can be extended to account for the social currency of normative behaviours, the recognisability or (stereo)typification of social personae or identities, or the transmission and transformation of ideologies of language use

Stereotyping Communicative Styles In and Out of the Language and Culture classroom: Japanese Indirectness, Ambiguity and Vagueness

The stereotype of reserved and evasive Japanese people, whose language naturally fosters ambiguity and an intuitive and indirect style, pervades popular as well as pedagogical discourse. Despite evidence that, depending on the situation, Japanese can be fairly direct, this persistent stereotype often acquires normative status in language and culture instruction. While acknowledging research that disproves the stereotype and notes instances of Japanese directness, this paper maintains that such widespread stereotypical perception of indirectness must also be acknowledged and explained. Quantitative research, based on analyses of the presence or absence of specific linguistic markers, may fail to account for the subjective nature of perceptions of indirectness. Since linguistic meanings can be scattered throughout the utterance and emerge from the interaction of linguistic forms with situational and relational variables, an analysis focused on linguistic markers often entails that whatever is responsible for the perception of an indirect style goes ‘under the radar’. While acknowledging the existence of such genuine perceptions, in this paper I also note the socially ‘contentious' nature of stereotypes, that can be observed in the seamless shift from descriptive statements (about regularities in linguistic patterning) to evaluative statements (that qualify ‘the Japanese’). Stereotypical statements about the communicative style attributed to the Japanese fail to question the argumentative positioning of the evaluator, an issue that language pedagogy must be particularly weary of. The paper presents various definitions of ‘indirectness’ that conceptualize it as a solution to some sort of interactional tension. It then describes an ethnographic interview conducted by the author with two native speakers of Japanese, and through an analysis of this conversation tries to provide a reasoned interpretation of the mechanisms responsible for the author’s perception of indirectness during the face-to-face encounter. Indirectness is considered a metasign obtained by the interaction and convergence of various lower-level linguistic signs. Its interactional meaning, however, is not fixed but affected by the participants’ frames of interpretation, i.e. participants’ understanding of and expectations about the nature of the activity under way, including its goals and the allowed contributions. Additionally, the discussion uses Jackendoff’s (2007) composite notion of social values to show how an individual’s (verbal) behaviour, including the use of an indirect style, can be taken to signal different types of social values: affective, normative, utilitarian values etc. This can account for similarities as well as differences to the value systems of other individuals within the same group or culture, and permits to avoid essentializing and stereotyping statements. I conclude by highlighting the implications of this analysis for language teachers: the need to bring to the fore the participant’s interpretive frames (typically different and potentially conflicting in intercultural communication), and the need to adopt a more elaborated notion of social values that can account for individual variability within broadly shared cultural parameters