Cross-cultural perception of some Japanese politeness and impoliteness expressions*
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Albert Rilliard
Abstract
Prosodic strategies may express polite or impolite speech acts. Five such strategies in Japanese are studied in a cross-cultural experiment. The attitudes are presented to subjects in different modalities: audio-only, video-only, audio-video and also described in Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) scripts. NSM scripts allow creating comparable translations of a given description, proposed in four languages: Japanese, American English, Brazilian Portuguese and French. Native subjects of these languages took a pair comparison test, as a way to measure the perceived proximity of presented stimuli. A multidimensional statistical analysis of the results allows a description of the main expressive dimensions perceived by subjects. The test shows the similarity of the perceptive patterns obtained via NSM scripts and visual and audio modalities. It also shows that subjects of different cultural origins shared about 60% of the global representation of these expressions, that 8% are unique to modalities, while 3% are unique to language background.
Abstract
Prosodic strategies may express polite or impolite speech acts. Five such strategies in Japanese are studied in a cross-cultural experiment. The attitudes are presented to subjects in different modalities: audio-only, video-only, audio-video and also described in Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) scripts. NSM scripts allow creating comparable translations of a given description, proposed in four languages: Japanese, American English, Brazilian Portuguese and French. Native subjects of these languages took a pair comparison test, as a way to measure the perceived proximity of presented stimuli. A multidimensional statistical analysis of the results allows a description of the main expressive dimensions perceived by subjects. The test shows the similarity of the perceptive patterns obtained via NSM scripts and visual and audio modalities. It also shows that subjects of different cultural origins shared about 60% of the global representation of these expressions, that 8% are unique to modalities, while 3% are unique to language background.
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Linguistic approaches to emotion in context 1
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Part I. Emotion, philosophy and language
- Emotions 21
- Passion, a forgotten feeling 39
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Part II. Expressing and interpreting emotion
- On “Disgust” 73
- A corpus-based construction of emotion verb scales 99
- Patterns of allocentric emotional expressions, a contrastive study* 113
- The expression of emotions in conditionals 137
- Conceptual metaphors of anger in popularized scientific texts 159
- Bad feelings in context 189
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Part III. Doing emotion
- Emotions and prosodic structure 215
- Prosody and emotion in Greek 231
- Cross-cultural perception of some Japanese politeness and impoliteness expressions* 251
-
Part IV. Pragmatic use of emotion
- Verbal aggressiveness or cooperative support? 279
- ‘I must do everything to eliminate my negative attitude’ 309
- Language learning and making the mundane special 331
- Name index 347
- Subject index 355
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Linguistic approaches to emotion in context 1
-
Part I. Emotion, philosophy and language
- Emotions 21
- Passion, a forgotten feeling 39
-
Part II. Expressing and interpreting emotion
- On “Disgust” 73
- A corpus-based construction of emotion verb scales 99
- Patterns of allocentric emotional expressions, a contrastive study* 113
- The expression of emotions in conditionals 137
- Conceptual metaphors of anger in popularized scientific texts 159
- Bad feelings in context 189
-
Part III. Doing emotion
- Emotions and prosodic structure 215
- Prosody and emotion in Greek 231
- Cross-cultural perception of some Japanese politeness and impoliteness expressions* 251
-
Part IV. Pragmatic use of emotion
- Verbal aggressiveness or cooperative support? 279
- ‘I must do everything to eliminate my negative attitude’ 309
- Language learning and making the mundane special 331
- Name index 347
- Subject index 355
