Method and scope in cross-cultural speech act research: A contrastive study of requests in Japanese and English

The Cross Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP), the most ambitious speech act research to date, focused on western languages and cultures and employed questionnaires in data collection. The results showed conventionally indirect requests to be the most favored for all languages studied, and hints the least frequent. Japanese interaction is said to be hearer-oriented, thus vague and indirect, so a study of requests in Japanese should reveal a greater preference for hints. However, since questionnaires do not reflect the negotiated nature of actual interaction, they may not be a valid means of data collection in Japanese. To address these issues, a discourse completion test (DCT) and a multiple choice questionnaire (MCQ) were administered to speakers Japanese and English. The DCT showed Japanese to be more direct than Americans. There were also significant differences between the DCT and MCQ results for both languages. Both groups chose to forego requests more frequently on the MCQ than on the DCT, and Japanese also chose to hint more frequently on the MCQ than on the DCT. These results argue against the use of elicited data, particularly in non-Western contexts.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Linguistics

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2011

Author dc:creator

• Rose, Kenneth Richard

Contributors dc:contributor

• Kachru, Yamuna

• Language, Linguistics

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 1992 Rose, Kenneth Richard

Language dc:language

eng

Identifier

AAI9236583
(UMI)AAI9236583

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/21525