Wierzbicka (1991, 1997) analyzes cultures through their key words. She gives Japanese culture a semantic analysis of seven Japanese key words of amae, enryo, wa, on, giri, and omoiyari, based on her way of representation making use of "Natural Semantic Metalanguage." My pragmatic analysis of some basic Japanese colloquial words including doozo/dooka, hai/ee, ne and others, in contrast with their English corresponding expressions, shows they share the common feature "exocentric". This can be defined as a pragmatic feature of usage in that an expression is used with its perspective oriented not in the speaker (but in the addressee or some social standard that (the speaker assumes) has social gravity) or, at least out of much consideration for such a perspective. We can find easily that the feature "exocentric" is concealed in some places of her semantic analysis of the key words, but this isn't captured in her way of semantic representation. The feature "exocentric" is compatible with the self-image of the Japanese delineated in the traditional studies of Japanese culture.

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This paper reports a longitudinal case study of a child's language development. Our subject often replies with 'n?' or 'un?' in raising intonation to the adults when she is spoken to. Such short questions are thought as conversational repairs based on several facts. We observed her language development from the point of her vocabulary, MLU, the number of conversational repairs that she requested, and her mother's reactions to her repair requests. We found that conversations of the same topic lasts longer when conversational repairs are requested, and that her mother's reactions to her requests for conversational repairs are significantly different in the last five months from the first five months of our observation, which possibly reflects the child's language development. Based on the results, we suggest that our subject's language development has been promoted by her active conversational repairs.

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