Cross-Cultural Discourse Pragmatics: Speaking about Hearsay in English and Japanese.

要旨

Every language has different systems for expressing third party information. While in some languages grammar rules stipulate how to do this, in both Japanese and English the degree of indirection or direction a speaker should use to express information obtained as hearsay is genuinely a pragmatic language issue. English speakers tend to express hearsay information in more direct forms than do Japanese speakers. Cross-cultural discourse analysis, focusing on the concept of the speaker's information territory, reveals that English and Japanese have different pragmatic rules for dealing with hearsay information. This study analyzed the issue from both cultur-al and linguistic perspectives, and examined implications for foreign language instruction. (Contains 26 references, 8 discourses and a list of grammatical abbreviations. Japanese utterances in the appendix are transcribed using the Hepburn romanization system.) (Author/MSE) ******************************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. ******************************************************************************** Cross-Cultural Discourse Pragmatics: Speaking about Hearsay in English and Japanese

主題