Volume 38, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Selected Papers from the 11th International Conference on Practical Linguistics of Japanese; Issue Editors: Masahiko Minami and Hisashi Noda

This paper investigates how participants use laughter to create and reinforce food attitudes in conversations over a Dairy Taster Brunch. Previous conversation analytic research on Japanese conversations about food has focused on food assessments, identification, and categorization. This research addresses the following questions: 1) How does food trigger humor and laughter in conversations over food? 2) What about the situation elicits laughter? 3) How is humor and laughter used to create and reinforce food attitudes in the conversational interaction? and 4) What kinds of food attitudes are created using humor and laughter in talk about food? Results show that food attitudes are not lodged in the individual but rather are created and reinforced moment-by-moment in temporally unfolding multimodal conversational interaction. This research contributes to the growing body of research on language and food, sheds light on the relation between laughter and food, and has implications for healthy eating, and cross-cultural communication.

There are basic grammatical items that are difficult to learn even for advanced learners, although they are introduced early at the beginning of their learning. Conjunctive expressions that imply speakers’ subjective feelings such as suruto ‘then,’ sokode ‘then and there’ are one such item. We use storytelling data from the “International Corpus of Japanese as a Second Language” to investigate how Japanese native speakers and Japanese L2 learners whose first languages are Chinese and Korean use conjunctive expressions at the turning moments of a story. The results indicate that even learners at an advanced level do not use conjunctive expressions that native Japanese speakers do to make stories vivid and lively. We explain this phenomenon using the concept of “subjective construal.” We further consult previous research on Japanese teaching practices and consider how to instruct this type of expression.

Japanese is considered to be a language in which speakers tend to take a subjective stance by locating themselves within the situation they construe. Previous research indicates that in storytelling, Japanese L2 learners employ fewer expressions of viewpoint than L1 speakers do, and viewpoint tends to shift from character to character. Do Japanese L2 learners, then, typically take an objective stance, or do they use other devices to take a subjective stance? The present study compared Japanese L2 learners’ subjective construal with that of L1 speakers in two types of storytelling. The results indicated that while Japanese L1 speakers typically used passive voice to maintain a viewpoint, L2 learners employed a variety of expressions related to emotion and evaluation to subjectively describe the given events throughout each story. The study suggests the existence of interlanguage in that L2 learners use vocabulary-based devices instead of grammatical devices for subjective construal.

The purpose of this study is to report differences in the use of filler words in Japanese language textbooks and provides examples. Filler words like “ Ano(o) ,” “ E(e) ,” “ Ma(a) ,” and “ De(e) ” are used as fillers in Japanese conversation, but in Japanese language textbooks, they are not considered appropriate teaching items for actual use. Specifically, examples of filler-like usage that need to be adopted as teaching items include “ Ano(o) ,” which appears commonly in the beginning or middle of sentences; “ E(e) ”,which is used in situations with a large number of listeners; “ Ma(a) ,” which is used in response to questions; and “ De ”, which appears in the middle of sentences.

This study describes how confirmation requests can be regarded as implying disagreement in Japanese decision-making meetings. By using the methodology of Conversation Analysis, I examined two specific sequential environments where participants in meetings are more likely to imply their disagreements through confirmation requests: (i) after a participant reports on his or her proposal and (ii) after a silence caused by a stalled discussion. The detailed analysis of the composition and sequential location of confirmation requests in these contexts revealed that linguistic items, vocal stress, or even conversational contexts can make a confirmation request heard as implying disagreement. In addition, choosing a confirmation request to imply disagreement is not a random decision but a thoughtful selection depending on the asymmetrical epistemic status or related to the management of topic progression in meetings.

This paper investigates Japanese youth language (abbreviated as “YL” thereafter) from a sociolinguistic approach and discusses whether the terminology itself is felicitous in capturing the group of words or the users it claims to be capturing by focusing on YL usage in real life and collected latest data featuring top-ranking YL words in 2018 and 2019. A closer examination of YL reveals that the usage not always matches users’ age, and that the terminology itself suggests an outsider view, creating a misconception that only young people use it. It is thus argued that age is not the correct label to define YL, and that various types of YL words exist under this umbrella notion that are used in different communities for various purposes. This article intends to promote a more comprehensive and objective understanding of YL.