Lidia Tanaka - Japanese Questions: Discourse, Context and Language

Japanese Questions

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Japanese Questions

Discourse, Context and Language

Lidia Tanaka

Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

To my father

Contents

This book could not have been written without the help of many people including my family, friends, anonymous reviewers and former supervisors who have contributed directly and indirectly. First, I want to thank Professor Mayumi Usami of the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies for kindly providing some of the data (BTS). The Japanese linguistic academic community is benefiting enormously due to her generosity. I am also very grateful for the support and encouragement given to me by my colleagues at La Trobe University and in particular Emeritus Prof. Judith Brett who gave me the opportunity to take a semester leave in 2009 that allowed me to write this manuscript.

I can never thank my former supervisors enough: Dr Hilary Chappell, Dr Eric Berendt and the late Dr Yukio Takefuta for imparting their knowledge and their passion for research. Without their initial teaching and guidance this book would never have been written.

A very special thank you to my friends and members of the Discourse Group: Kerry Mullan, Joe Taylor, Novi Djenar, Clodagh Norwood, Sandra Masel, Averil Grieve, Shimako Iwasaki, Hossein Shokouhi. Our meetings contributed to the development of my thoughts and gave me innumerable suggestions. I hope that we will continue enjoying wonderful discussions.

My heartfelt gratitude goes to Teresa Castelvetere for her excellent editing skills and especially for her friendship. I would also like to thank Sudha Joshi for being such a wonderful friend and for her unwavering encouragement during all these years.

I am also very thankful to the editors Gurdeep Mattu, Andrew Wardell and Srikanth for their support and editorial assistance.

Last, but not least, my greatest gratitude goes to my family, Peter and Marcel, Nlida, my best friend Chikako, and my mother for their encouragement at every stage of this project.

The following conventions suggested by Du Bois, Schuetze-Coburn, Paolino and Cumming (1990) were used for the transcription of the data.

*Symbol devised for this study

Hepburn System

The original Hepburn System uses , , and for the corresponding long vowels. However, for conveniences sake I use double vowels instead.

Consonant+Consonant+Vowel

Double consonant

Preliminaries

It is known that the context is a major variable in how communication is conducted, nevertheless, how exactly it affects the use and production of questions is less known. The differences or similarities of questions used in spoken interactions have received less attention, in particular for languages where the structure of canonical questions is so different to their informal variants. This book examines how Japanese questions are used in different communicative settings and analyses their form, their use within the interaction and their influence in the course of the conversation. It analyses and compares the ways questions are used in formal, informal and unacquainted interactions to deepen our understanding of the use of questions in spoken Japanese. The book takes the viewpoint that language and context are mutually dependent and influence each other in a dynamic process. Factors such as the goal of interaction and the speakers relationships decide the linguistic choices of interlocutors which in turn shape their stances. Although the intrinsic relationship between context and discourse is widely acknowledged (e.g. Ervin-Tripp and Miller, 1977; Goodwin and Duranti, 1992; Gumperz, 1982; Holmes, 1984; Levinson, 1992; Schiffrin, 1987), with the exception of politeness-related studies, there are only a limited number of empirical studies on Japanese that show what linguistic changes occur in different contexts.