Rilliard, Albert; Erickson, Donna; De Moraes, João Antônio; & Shochi, Takaaki (2014). Cross-cultural perception of some Japanese politeness and impoliteness expressions. In Fabienne Baider & Georgeta Cislaru (Eds.), Linguistic approaches to emotions in context (pp. 251-276). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
DOI: 10.1075/pbns.241.15ril
Abstract:
Prosodic strategies may express polite or impolite speech acts. Five such strategies in Japanese were studied in a cross-cultural experiment. The attitudes were presented to subjects in different modalities: audio-only, video-only, audio-video; they were also described in NSM scripts written in Japanese, American English, Brazilian Portuguese and French. Native subjects of these languages took a pair comparison test, as a way to measure the perceived proximity of presented stimuli. A multidimensional statistical analysis of the results allows a description of the main expressive dimensions perceived by subjects. The test shows the similarity of the perceptive patterns obtained via NSM scripts and visual and audio modalities. It also shows that subjects of different cultural origins shared about 60% of the global representation of these expressions, that 8% are unique to modalities, while 3% are unique to language background.
Rating:
Sound application of NSM principles carried out without prior training by an experienced NSM practitioner
