Reviewed by R. A. Brown, Bunkyo University and Waseda University, Japan

With some notable exceptions, linguistic field workers have primarily relied on the inconsistent introspections and intuitions of native speakers—including themselves—for semantic judgments both as data and as evidence in support of a theory. Senko K. Maynard does not depart from this tradition. M’s objective is to clarify the methods by which speakers of Japanese communicate ‘personalized expressive meanings’ (i.e. ‘feelings of intimacy or distance, emotion, empathy, humor, playfulness, persona, sense of self, identity, [and] rhetorical effects’ [xiii]) in addition to the literal, propositional, truth-functional content of an utterance.

M covers an impressive range of discourse phenomena, including language play, genre mixing, style borrowing, metaphor, and several specifically Japanese rhetorical devices (e.g. mitate, which ‘connects items unconnected through the ordinary grammar […] based on common knowledge or […] analogy’ [35], and futaku, which is ‘a method for expressing one’s feelings by borrowing something concrete’ [35]), and most interestingly, perspectivization of selves, an idea with important crossdisciplinary relevance. M draws on the ideas and vocabulary of Lev Semenovich Vygotsky, Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, Max Black, Motoki Tokieda, Nobuo Sato, and Roy Harris to highlight a view of language in which meaning is created by the act of speaking in a context, rather than, for example, being inherently expressed by lexical elements.

Of interest is M’s discussion of the utterance-final expression mitaina ‘it seems’, which is used by younger speakers as a modal operator that functions to disclaim personal responsibility for what has just been asserted—even if the content of the assertion is the speaker’s internal subjective state. A similar phenomenon has been observed in South Korea: South Korean college-aged students describe their condition as though by a third party, for example kwaenchanun kot k’attayo ‘I seem to be ok’. M takes this as characteristic of contemporary Japanese youth as well as a symptom of social and psychological insecurity.

The conclusions are impaired by M’s over-reliance on the noncontextualized intuitions of isolated and exceptional individuals. This is unfortunate, because the questions are highly amenable to empirical investigation exploiting Labovian methods. However, a positive contribution of this volume is the inclusion of extensive textual materials from a variety of print and discourse sources in both alphabetic rooma-ji ‘Romanization’ and Japanese mazegaki (i.e. mixed kanji and kana) script, along with translations. These texts will be extremely useful for beginning and intermediate students of Japanese as a foreign language.