Asano, Yuko (2002). How to be indirect in Japanese – A cultural script approach. RASK (International Journal of Language and Communication), 17. 23-51. PDF (open access)
Although Japanese and English have a large variety of indirect expressions, they often use them in different proportions, which leads to different communicative styles. This paper investigates certain indirectness phenomena observed in sentence-final forms in Japanese from the perspective of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) theory. It combines NSM theory with Kamio’s theory of territory of information. Akio Kamio used this theory to specify the relationship between utterance forms and the notion of territory of information. As he points out, there are cases where the principles of the theory can be violated; it seems that such violations are more or less culturally determined. This paper particularly focuses on such cases and provides a cross-cultural analysis of Japanese and English, making use of contrastive data from both languages.
Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners
