抄録
Japanese person references show different characteristics than person pronouns in
European languages. Watashi ‘I’ and anata ‘you’ indicate the speaker and the interlocutor
in Japanese, but the usage does not completely agree with the way English speakers use
I or you . Names, kin terms, and job titles are used as person references as well as person
pronouns in Japanese. Choices of person references must be made according to the social
relation and psychological distance between the speaker and the interlocutor and the
formality of the situation in addition to the speaker’s gender, the personality, and the
background. Large numbers of learners of Japanese do not command the usages of person
references naturally in daily conversations. Many of them face the problem of not having
substantive opportunities to be exposed to native Japanese where speakers use various
types of person references. The paper takes up the usages of the first and the second
person references in order to focus on the relation between the speaker and the interlocutor,
and discusses the efficacy of using TV dramas as learning materials by showing the
variety of the person reference in daily conversations and the diversity of speakers’
intentions of the utterance.
