A Rapport Management Approach to the Speech Act of Advice in Japanese

Abstract

One of the speech acts that easily disrupts human relationships is giving advice. This paper aims to clarify how Chinese learners of Japanese (CJL) give advice compared with native speakers of Japanese (JN). One of the frameworks used most frequently in pragmatics to explain cross-cultural differences is Brown and Levinson’s Politeness Principle (1987). However, this paper argues that the rapport management model may provide a more powerful way of explaining pragmatic findings within Japanese contexts. The data collected from a discourse completion task (DCT) were analyzed in terms of semantic formula sequences and were categorized according to meaning.