Wakefield, John; Itakura, Hiroko (2017). English vs. Japanese condolences: What people say and why. In Vahid Parvaresh, & Alessandro Capone (Eds.), The pragmeme of accommodation: The case of interaction around the event of death (pp. 203-231). Berlin: Springer.
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-55759-5_12
Abstract:
This paper uses the ethnopragmatics approach to discover the sociopragmatic knowledge that influences what English and Japanese speakers say when condoling bereaved people who have recently lost someone close to them. Linguistic data are drawn from previous studies on English and Japanese condolences, discourse completion tasks, movies and the authors’ native-speaker intuitions. Analyses from the literature on condolences contribute to the discussion. Cultural scripts — one for English and one for Japanese — are presented as hypotheses to account for the observed verbal and non-verbal behaviour of English and Japanese speakers when offering condolences. It is proposed that the social closeness between the deceased and the bereaved affects what all condolers say, but that this effect is different for English and Japanese speakers. Another key difference is that the perceived role of the condoler is different between the two languacultures: Japanese speakers sense a greater responsibility to share in the mourning process.
Rating:
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
