This paper reviews two salient meta-theoretical trends in psychology and cognitive science in these decades and discusses their relationship. The first trend can be called biologization, which emphasizes the idea that human minds are a product of biological evolution. The second trend represents a social or cultural scientific view that stresses that the operation and formation of the mature human mind are based on sociocultural contexts. These seemingly opposing trends are in fact complementary in terms of our understanding of human mind-mentalities, because the mind as a product of evolution has to be instantiated into culture-dependent mentalities in the process of development and expertise. A few implications of the complementarity for psycho- and sociolinguistic research are offered.

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To understand how Japanese native speakers select and establish their speech style during a first meeting conversation, this paper compares native situations (conversation with a native speaker) with contact situations (conversation with a Chinese/Taiwanese advanced-level learner of Japanese) and examines the mechanism of the speech style shift by applying the politeness theory of Brown & Levinson (1987). Sampled data are 15-minute first meeting conversations between pairs of college students: 4 native situations and 8 contact situations. As a result of the analysis of 1) frequency and characteristics of each speech style occurrence, and 2) characteristics of speech style shift at the macro-level, it becomes apparent that both sets of results are influenced considerably by the situation, and that native speakers adopt substantially different language behavior accordingly.

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The purpose of this research is to investigate how "positive politeness strategy" appears in Japanese and Korean refusal discourse. Based on data from a role-play investigation I analyze "positive politeness strategy" from the point of view of "quantity and quality", "differences between uchi, soto, yoso" , "gender differences". The following points are uncovered in the analyses: (1) Positive politeness strategy is more frequent in Korean than in Japanese (quantity); (2) Korean usage of positive politeness strategy is more geared to saving face of the listener than is Japanese (quality); (3) The positive politeness strategy of Japanese could be classified according to the discriminations of "uchi, soto, yoso" , while that of Korean could not; (4) The difference in rates of usage between men and women is more prominent in Japanese than in Korean (gender).

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The purpose of this paper is to analyze jokes in terms of positive politeness. This will be achieved by focusing on situations of playful conflict where one speaker opposes the other as a joke. During playful conflict speakers repeatedly oppose each other, but they do so in a non-serious way, thus appealing to each other's positive face. My findings suggest that there are two important aspects of playful conflict. Firstly, there are two recurrent opening formats. Playful conflicts arise when (a) one speaker directly opposes the other, or (b) when one speaker intentionally says a nonsense which invites the other to oppose. Secondly, I discuss the cues that enable speakers to frame talk as playful conflict. The cues include exaggerated emotional expressions, style switching and laughter.

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This paper discusses the language educational policies in Germany, especially focusing on the policy of Turkish language teaching. Its purpose is to grasp the actual situation and the problems to be solved. As an example, I examine Turkish language instruction in Bonn and its suburbs in Northrhine-Westphalia and analyze it through statistical data, interviews with a specialist on mother tongue teaching, and observations of the instruction in Turkish. The following results were obtained: (1) Due to a change in the policy of this state, foreign students, whose origins are not 'the former recruitment countries', also became eligible for the mother tongue instruction. (2) In Bonn, there is an inequality in language teaching policy. That is, there is still a tendency to select the official languages that are spoken in 'the former recruitment countries' regardless of the number of immigrant children. (3) It seems that Turkish instruction contributes to students' understanding of their 'homeland Turkey' and to the formation of a "Turkish descent" identity, rather than accelerating the acquisition of their mother tongue. From a different angle, one may say that there is a vast gap between state policy and actual school practice. (4) Turkish immigrant children have not sufficiently developed literacy in Turkish. Therefore, there is a need to accelerate it in the mother tongue instruction.

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