「アメリカ人と日本人による相手の顔を脅かす発話行為の検証 : 不同意及び相手の当惑を伴う言及の場合」の摸写研究

抄録

The purpose of this study is to replicate the study of American and Japanese performance on face-threatening acts conducted by Beebe and Takahashi (1989) and to examine and evaluate the results and methodologies of both studies. This study focuses on "disagreement situation" and "embarrassing information". The discourse completion test (DCT) used in the original study was used in this study. The subjects were 4 Japanese ESL learners who responded in English, 4 native speakers of Japanese who responded in Japanese, and 4 native speakers of English who responded in English. Although this study was done in a small scale, it adopted interviewing each subject after s/he finished filling out each item of DCTs. The responses were analyzed according to semantic formulas and examined in interview report. This replication study confirms the conclusion of the original study that Americans are not so direct as we expect and that Japanese speakers can be very straight forward depending on the situation. The interviews shed light on possible reasons for the bluntness of Japanese speakers. This study suggests the importance of examining the subjects' utterances from a linguistic point of view, since both American and Japanese speakers adopted sociolinguistically different strategy of performing politeness.