2018 Volume 21 Issue 1 Pages 207-224
The purpose of this paper is to study interpersonal differences in negotiating a suggestion among three participants through a contrastive analysis of task-solving conversations in Japanese and Russian. The data used is from triad conversations in which two participants are friends and the third is a stranger. Focusing on interpersonal differences, the author collected two types of discourse samples in each language. The first type was from situations in which a stranger joined a negotiation started by two friends. The second type was from situations in which a friend joined a negotiation started by a friend with a stranger. The results of the discourse analysis of the Japanese and Russian conversations showed that in both situations, the person who joined the conversation later moved negotiations to an agreement by supporting one of the negotiating sides. Moreover, in the Japanese conversations, the friend who joined the conversation later was seen to support the friend already in the conversation, while in the Russian conversations, a stranger joining a conversation was more likely to join the negotiation without supporting either of the negotiators and introduce new ideas that stimulated the negotiation.
