The Acquisition of Communicative Style in Japanese
Cindy Comas
October 25, 2012
Title: The Acquisition of Communicative Style in Japanese
Author: Patricia M. Clancy
Author’s Info: Associate professor and Chair of the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She’s interested in language acquisition because she thinks that if we could understand what grammar is for the very young children, we would gain insight into its true nature.
Date Published: 1986
Key Points:
1. The Japanese communicate in an intuitive and indirect way when it’s compared to Americans.
• Verbosity in Japan has been looked down upon. They rely heavily on non-verbal behavior. Their cultural values emphasize omoyari which means ‘empathy’ over verbal communication.
• They tend to talk a lot less that we do.
• Their rhetorical patterns are what you can call “circular”. In other words, they use analog thinking and go in circles before reaching a conclusion; which means they always think before they talk. Their communication is often inexplicit and indirect.
2. Japanese is a left-branching verb-final language, with negation appearing as a verb suffix. This means that the speaker can negate a sentence at the last moment, depending on the addressee’s expression.
• For example, in this conversation.
-“It isn’t that we can’t do it this way,” one Japanese will say.
-“of course,” replies his friend, “we couldn’t deny that it would be impossible to say that it couldn’t be done.”
- “but unless we can say that it can’t be done,” says his friend, “it would be impossible not to admit that we couldn’t avoid doing it.” Basically what they are saying is the following:
- “Yes, we can do it this way”
- “of course it’s possible to do”
- “unless we can say we can’t, it’s possible to do it”
Americans is likely to find this way of speech mind blogging to process. But this is their way of being reserved, cautious and evasive.
3. This doesn’t mean that they don’t express their own thoughts and feeling.
October 25, 2012
Title: The Acquisition of Communicative Style in Japanese
Author: Patricia M. Clancy
Author’s Info: Associate professor and Chair of the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She’s interested in language acquisition because she thinks that if we could understand what grammar is for the very young children, we would gain insight into its true nature.
Date Published: 1986
Key Points:
1. The Japanese communicate in an intuitive and indirect way when it’s compared to Americans.
• Verbosity in Japan has been looked down upon. They rely heavily on non-verbal behavior. Their cultural values emphasize omoyari which means ‘empathy’ over verbal communication.
• They tend to talk a lot less that we do.
• Their rhetorical patterns are what you can call “circular”. In other words, they use analog thinking and go in circles before reaching a conclusion; which means they always think before they talk. Their communication is often inexplicit and indirect.
2. Japanese is a left-branching verb-final language, with negation appearing as a verb suffix. This means that the speaker can negate a sentence at the last moment, depending on the addressee’s expression.
• For example, in this conversation.
-“It isn’t that we can’t do it this way,” one Japanese will say.
-“of course,” replies his friend, “we couldn’t deny that it would be impossible to say that it couldn’t be done.”
- “but unless we can say that it can’t be done,” says his friend, “it would be impossible not to admit that we couldn’t avoid doing it.” Basically what they are saying is the following:
- “Yes, we can do it this way”
- “of course it’s possible to do”
- “unless we can say we can’t, it’s possible to do it”
Americans is likely to find this way of speech mind blogging to process. But this is their way of being reserved, cautious and evasive.
3. This doesn’t mean that they don’t express their own thoughts and feeling.