Japanese Questions: Discourse, Context and Language

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Questions and interrogatives in Japanese discourse have attracted considerable interest from grammarians, but the communicative aspect has received little attention. This book fills this gap. Through detailed analyses of formal and informal interactions, this book demonstrates that the inherent multi-functional and polysemous aspect of language can also be observed in the use of questions. What emerges is a sense of the considerable variety of question forms and also an understanding of how questions are used to perform a wide range of social actions. The importance of context is stressed throughout the book; both in guiding the speakers choices of question types and in helping to create the particular stance that characterizes those interactions. The data used in this book shows that speakers prefer questions that are not canonical. When speakers do use canonical questions, these are overwhelmingly accompanied by some mollifiers. This phenomenon suggests that in Japanese communication the illocutionary force of canonical questions is too strong. To soften the interaction, speakers tend to use other types of interrogative forms such as statements with rising intonation or, at least, to leave questions grammatically unfinished. The findings in this book contribute to the understanding of how Japanese speakers use questions in different communicative interactions and provide new evidence of the gap between prescriptive grammar and actual communication.

Reviews

Japanese Questions presents an original, well-researched and fascinating exploration of discourse and social context. It provides fresh insights into the use of questions in Japanese through a wide range of examples and sophisticated analysis. -- Ikuko Nakane, Senior Lecturer in Japanese Studies, University of Melbourne, Australia
This book presents groundbreaking new work on an unusual array of question types in contemporary Japanese -- ones that have not been previously well-explored or even included in prescriptive descriptions of Japanese grammar. With exquisite skill, Dr Tanaka unravels the social and cultural motivations behind the use of non-canonical interrogatives such as the grammatically unfinished, the elliptical and the half questions, the latter characteristic of young people's language. Crucially, her discourse data are taken from real interaction recorded from television and telephone interviews, or during radio phone-in programmes and in conversations between friends as well as between unacquainted persons. Japanese Questions is certain to impact with force on received views about interrogativity. -- Hilary M.Chappell, Chair Professor in Linguistic Typology of East Asia, EHESS, Paris, France
This wonderful study is a clear and insightful analysis of questioning strategies in Japanese, based on a substantial corpus of real data from television interviews, radio talk-back and casual conversation among friends and between strangers. Like the 2004 book by the same author, Gender Language and Culture, it uses modern discourse analysis techniques to improve our understanding of the syntactic, pragmatic and cultural factors in Japanese interaction. It develops new insights into the use of reciprocating questions, half-questions and other forms of questioning, and makes an important contribution to work in discourse analysis as well as to our knowledge of these phenomena in contemporary Japanese. -- David Bradley, Professor of Linguistics, La Trobe University, Australia

Author Bio

Lidia Tanaka is Senior Lecturer and Japanese Program Co-ordinator in the Japanese Program, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, La Trobe University, Australia