Japanese compliment discourse: The process of collaborative construction
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Kyoko Satoh
Abstract
Following on Pomerantz’s (1978) study, the speech act of compliment has been studied from various aspects. Past studies have been confined largely to examination of a single compliment and its response pair. However, actual compliment speech acts rarely end after one such exchange. Therefore, this paper observes the strategic development of compliment discourse: how compliment discourse, a series of exchanges that include compliments and their responses, develops, recesses, and moves into the next topic. In analyzing the extended speech act, rather than merely compliment response pairs, this research reveals the following developmental patterns: repetition of compliment and response, followed by frame shift to close the compliment discourse. The findings indicate that people collaboratively construct compliment discourse for the purpose of facework, i.e., avoidance of self-praise and agreement with others, and respecting evaluation of evaluation.
© 2017 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Contents
- Extended discourse in first and second language acquisition: A challenge and an opportunity
- Japanese compliment discourse: The process of collaborative construction
- Sequential patterns of storytelling using omotte in Japanese conversation
- A corpus-based analysis of the paradigmatic development of semi-polite verbs in Chinese and Korean learners of Japanese
- Language learners’ use of non-turn-final ne
- A role for “air writing” in second-language learners’ acquisition of Japanese in the age of the word processor
- On expressions of agent de-topicalized intentional events: A contrastive study between Japanese and Russian
Articles in the same Issue
- Contents
- Extended discourse in first and second language acquisition: A challenge and an opportunity
- Japanese compliment discourse: The process of collaborative construction
- Sequential patterns of storytelling using omotte in Japanese conversation
- A corpus-based analysis of the paradigmatic development of semi-polite verbs in Chinese and Korean learners of Japanese
- Language learners’ use of non-turn-final ne
- A role for “air writing” in second-language learners’ acquisition of Japanese in the age of the word processor
- On expressions of agent de-topicalized intentional events: A contrastive study between Japanese and Russian
