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Cultural differences of preferred communication type: how can we react politely to unattainable request?| old_uid | 4664 |
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| title | Cultural differences of preferred communication type: how can we react politely to unattainable request? |
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| start_date | 2008/04/22 |
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| schedule | 10h30 |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | /, /, salle des conférences Jacques Cartier |
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| summary | Reacting negatively to one’s request generally needs especially careful consideration, since it can threaten one’s face. Then how can we react politely to an unattainable request? The answer to this question seems to vary from one culture to another. In this talk I shall clarify that Japanese society has developed at least two different ways: (i) Reject the request as soon as possible so that the requester should not waste his/her time; (ii) Show effort to attain the request to the requester even if it is not attainable. Although there may be a dialectal difference, (ii) is widely attested in Japanese society. This can be most clearly observed in the usage of Japanese thinking fillers. As well as many other languages, Japanese has a lot of fillers uttered while the speaker is thinking (Sadanobu and Takubo 1995). The speaker, however, sometimes already knows the result of his/her thinking at the time point of uttering such thinking fillers. For example, a thinking filler saa appears only in the course of thinking followed by negative responses (Sadanobu 2002; 2005). In replying to a question “Don’t you know a police station around hear?”, the speaker can say (1) Saa, chotto wakarimasen (“Saa, I don’t know.”) or (2) Saa, konoatari kooban-wa naito omoimasuyo (“Saa, I don’t think there is a police station around here.”), but never (3) ??Saa, kooban-wa asoko-desu (“??Saa, the police station is there”). Based on over 50 hour recordings of natural conversation and questionnaires, this work investigates the usage of the filler saa and explores the politeness strategy (ii) in Japanese culture. |
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| oncancel | Jour et horaire inhabituels |
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| responsibles | Lœvenbruck, Welby |
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