The purpose of this paper is to describe the history of Christian vocabulary in Japan in relation to society. The history of Christianity in Japan began with the arrival to Japanese shores of the Jesuit missionary, Francis Xavier, in 1549. After its introduction, Christianity went through periods of encouragement, prohibition, persecution, a long period of concealment, and eventually revival. Christian vocabulary items originally introduced by the missionaries were translated in various ways over time. This was particularly the case in the areas of Nagasaki and Amakusa where Christianity was particularly strong and contributed to several linguistic phenomena peculiar to these regions. Official prohibition of Christianity resulted in a generally negative view of the religion and its adherents, and some words introduced by the missionaries came to be used in a discriminatory fashion. After World War II, such negative connotations died away. In recent years a more positive use of Christian vocabulary in the promotion of tourism and the marketing of local products and arts and crafts, has accompanied the recognition of the missionary period as an important part of the regional history of the Nagasaki and Amakusa areas and the drive to preserve this aspect of Nagasaki and Amakusa's heritage.

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This study introduces the reasoning behind a proposed paradigm change in sign-language studies that shifts attention from language-centered research focused on grammar and syntax to communication-centered research focused on the use of language in daily life. This paper does not address social issues related to deaf education and disability services, but rather clarifies how native signers communicate with one another during conversations. I will attempt to integrate methodologies derived from gesture studies (e.g., the concept of a gesture unit) and conversation analysis (e.g., the concept of a turn-taking system) to develop a new multimodal methodology for the analysis of sign-language conversations. I expect this methodology to contribute to areas such as the investigations of the synchronicity between the signing of words and the performance of mouth movements, and the mechanisms underpinning overlap in sign-language conversations. After presenting a detailed explanation of the transcription and annotation of the data obtained in sign-language conversations, I will introduce two case studies related to turn-taking and overlap in conversation. I also anticipate that this approach will motivate individuals without previous exposure to deaf people and sign language to become more familiar with both.

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This study investigates how non-native Japanese speakers in Japan cope with written language in daily life. Interviews were conducted of 42 people; 22 non-native speakers, and 20 people who have assisted non-native speakers with written language issues. Although all the non-native interviewees had difficulty reading Japanese text, they were seen to cope by employing strategies which they had developed through everyday experience such as asking people for assistance and using other visual information. When these strategies could be employed, problems with written language were subtle. However, in other situations problems were overt. In this study, the various problems were analyzed within the framework of Language Management Theory, and the situational factors related to the problems were considered.

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Speech Act Theory (Austin, 1962) proposed that certain types of linguistic forms (e.g. illocutionary verbs) provide utterances with illocutionary force. Some researchers, however, have argued that SAT cannot adequately expound the macropragmatic features of language use, such as 'sequences of utterances,' and 'situational context.' With illocutionary force as our backdrop, this paper focuses on Mey (2001), who suggested SAT needed to be viewed from a social perspective. According to Mey, the force of an utterance should not be attributed to its linguistic form but rather, it should be regulated by the macro-societal framework, with the recipient being able to give a proper 'uptake' of the circumstances (or as Mey puts it, situational 'setting up'). Although this paper strongly agrees with Mey's macro-societal perspective, the authors suggest that his theory can be supplemented by micro-societal aspects of human interaction. Using the findings of four video episodes from fourteen participants, this paper aims to redefine the notion of force in terms of the constructivist view of communication.

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This paper takes on the perspective of linguistic anthropology and analyses the data of exchanges in a Spanish interpreter-mediated courtroom under the Japanese lay judge system using a Spanish interpreter, from the following points: 1) Coherence, which is a key element for the trustworthiness of a testimony, is neither objective nor absolute, but is culturally constructed through meta-pragmatic processes involved in discursive practice; 2) Interpreters, who are perceived as non-participants according to the courtroom discursive norm (or courtroom pragmatic ideology), and actually involved in constructing the poetic discursive text; 3) Courtroom discursive practice, which is woven out of the interplay between "what is said" (denotational text) and is more likely to surface in interactants' minds, and what is meta-pragmatically regimented through cultural stereotypes (Putnam, 1975) such as "common sense," pragmatics, and "cultural ideology," which tend to be implicit and are often indexed as a premise. Although one of the objectives of introducing the lay judge system is to have the wholesome "common sense" of citizens properly reflected in the trial process, this study shows that in this new system, discursive cultural gaps for the foreign accused are often deepened and left untranslated. The paper suggests the necessity of revisiting the court interpreter's role from the perspective of multi-layered discursive practice.

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This study investigates how word accent of Japanese is maintained or changed by immigrants from Hiroshima Prefecture and their families living in Paraguay and clarifies the various factors related to it. The author's research on generational and geographic change of dialectal accent in Hiroshima City and the Sanyo region were used as a base for this study. In this paper, the generational transition of word accent of 2-morae words, 3-morae words, 4-morae words, loan words and 3-morae adjectives is discussed. It was found that the word accent of many words used by first generation were retained by the second and the third generation, while the accent of some words had changed. It is notable that standardization of word accent could also be seen in the Paraguay community, and that this process is similar to the process of standardization we can see in Hiroshima dialect in Japan. Since the 1980's, great change in Japanese immigrant community in Paraguay have been brought on by infrastructure maintenance, increased personal exchange between Japan and Paraguay, the development of Japanese language education, and increased daily contact with Japanese language through the media. These changes seem to have contributed to the maintenance Japanese language and the acquisition of the new accent of Japanese. However, increased vagueness of accent and the disappearance of ceertain accents were also observed. These tendencies will probably continue along with the shift towards greater use of Spanish in future.

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This study introduces the language acquisition process of a simultaneous Japanese-Korean bilingual infant, and analyzes mixing and interference between the two languages. First, focusing on the relationship of language environment and dominant language, the language acquisition process of the infant is described in terms of seven periods. Furthermore, mixing and interference between the two languages are considered in relation to the dominant language at the time of occurrence.

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This paper describes the results of a study of the correlation of length of stay in Japan and linguistic competence using data of 1,662 responses to the "Japanese for daily life: a nationwide survey," according to occupational category. Two indexes were used to measure of linguistic competence: a six-stage "Japanese ability self-evaluation" of the four skills-reading, writing, listening, and speaking; and the "number of linguistic behaviors able to be done"-interviewees were asked "Can you do this in Japanese?" in relation to 105 linguistic behaviors, and the number they said they could do was their score for this index. The results suggest that natural acquisition seems difficult because even though correlation between length of stay and self-evaluation of Japanese ability was on the whole high for listening and speaking, correlation was low for people in the occupational categories of "manufacturing and construction industry", "agriculture, forestry and fisheries industry", "service industry", and "housewife", for reading and writing. Moreover, the correlation between length of stay in Japan and "number of linguistic behaviors able to be done" was reasonably high for "housewives", but low for employed "specialists." This result may have been largely influenced by the amount at opportunities to do the specific verbal behaviors of the questions rather than linguistic competence.

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This study examined the lay theories of depression in Japanese undergraduate students. People tend to have the lay theories of depression, that is, causes of depression, depressive behaviors, depressive symptoms, and remedies of depression. We investigated the lay theories of depression of Japanese undergraduate students using the SCT method. Three hundred and thirteen Japanese students filled out questionnaires and described their lay theories of depression. The text data obtained from the questionnaire replies was analyzed using a text mining method and the KJ method. The results showed that participants mentioned the characteristics of depression, images of depressed persons, reasons of depression, and treatment for depression. The implications of the results and suggestions for further studies were also discussed.

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This paper discusses the effectiveness of language and communication education utilizing critical discourse analysis. The purpose of such an approach is to help students critically analyze linguistic elements, including the selection of information and lexical items, sentence structure, and the textual relationships between sentences, in order to clarify how values and interpretive frameworks of events are constructed in discourse. Through analysis and discussion of two types of text related to environmental issues, students became conscious of how discourse produces values and frameworks of social understanding, and were prompted to critically examine their own ways of thinking. This paper suggests that communication education utilizing critical discourse analysis as method can support students in establishing attitudes of critical examination of the values and interpretive frameworks shaped by various kinds of discourse they will encounter in the future, enabling them to act with clarity and understanding of the meanings and effects of such values and frameworks on society.

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