Emic understandings of attentiveness and its related concepts among Japanese

Authors

  • Saeko Fukushima Tsuru University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/eap.v1i2.31762

Keywords:

metapragmatics, attentiveness, Japanese, generation, emic understandings

Abstract

Emic understandings of politeness and interpersonal relations are important in current im/politeness research, and there is a need to explore intra-cultural politeness practices. This study investigates the emic understandings of Japanese people with two generations on an interpersonal notion through metapragmatic interview data. The interpersonal notion investigated here is attentiveness. Its related concepts, namely, empathy and anticipatory inference, are also investigated. The participants were asked to outline their understanding of the three notions above. The results show that the participants think that the three notions are important, which suggests a similarity between the two groups of the participants. This may suggest that the moral order does not differ greatly among the participants and that the three concepts investigated here are related to politeness. A closer look at the results, however, shows that there were some subtle cross-generational differences. This suggests the existence of intra-cultural variability in Japanese culture. 

Author Biography

  • Saeko Fukushima, Tsuru University

    Saeko Fukushima is Professor in the Department of English at Tsuru University in Japan. She has published Requests and Culture: Politeness in British English and Japanese (Peter Lang 2000/2002/2003) and articles in edited volumes and international journals such as Journal of Politeness Research, Journal of Pragmatics, Language Sciences, Multilingua, Pragmatics and World Englishes. Her research interests include cross-cultural pragmatics, intercultural pragmatics, sociopragmatics, pragmalinguistics, politeness, and metapragmatics.

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Published

2016-11-11

Issue

Section

Articles

How to Cite

Fukushima, S. (2016). Emic understandings of attentiveness and its related concepts among Japanese. East Asian Pragmatics, 1(2), 181-208. https://doi.org/10.1558/eap.v1i2.31762