Politeness in institutional elderly care in Japan: A cross-cultural comparison

Peter Backhaus

doi:10.1515/JPLR.2009.004

Article

Politeness in institutional elderly care in Japan: A cross-cultural comparison

Peter Backhaus

Published/Copyright: January 15, 2009

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From the journal Volume 5 Issue 1

Abstract

This paper looks at communication between staff and residents in a Japanese elderly care facility. It discusses the role of politeness in this special type of health care setting from a cross-cultural perspective. Starting with a review of previous literature on the topic, some basic characteristics of communication between staff and residents in nursing homes are outlined. The overall conditions that apply in the caring context with regard to linguistic politeness are described on the basis of Brown and Levinson's framework. The main part of the paper presents speech data from a Japanese nursing home, analyzed in direct comparison with data from other cultural contexts. In so doing, an attempt is made to outline some common communicative features in institutional elderly care. The summarizing discussion focuses on the question of whether the special conditions of institutional elderly care may indeed generate very similar types of communication across different cultural settings.

Keywords:: Japan; politeness; institutional elderly care; gerontolinguistics; joking; compliments

Published Online: 2009-01-15

Published in Print: 2009-January

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Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/JPLR.2009.004

Keywords for this article

Japan; politeness; institutional elderly care; gerontolinguistics; joking; compliments