{"id":847,"date":"2010-09-06T10:00:04","date_gmt":"2010-09-06T08:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elanguage.net\/blogs\/booknotices\/?p=847"},"modified":"2010-07-07T09:14:51","modified_gmt":"2010-07-07T07:14:51","slug":"linguistic-creativity-in-japanese-discourse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/?p=847","title":{"rendered":"Linguistic creativity in Japanese discourse"},"content":{"rendered":"
Linguistic creativity in Japanese discourse: <\/em><\/strong>Exploring the multiplicity of self, perspective, and voice. By Senko K. Maynard<\/strong>. (Pragmatics & beyond new series<\/a> 159.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007. Pp. xvi, 356. ISBN 9789027254023<\/a>. $165 (Hb).<\/div>\n

Reviewed by R. A. Brown<\/strong>, Bunkyo University and Waseda University, Japan<\/em><\/p>\n

With some notable exceptions, linguistic field workers have primarily relied on the inconsistent introspections and intuitions of native speakers\u2014including themselves\u2014for semantic judgments both as data and as evidence in support of a theory. Senko K. Maynard does not depart from this tradition. M\u2019s objective is to clarify the methods by which speakers of Japanese communicate \u2018personalized expressive meanings\u2019 (i.e. \u2018feelings of intimacy or distance, emotion, empathy, humor, playfulness, persona, sense of self, identity, [and] rhetorical effects\u2019 [xiii]) in addition to the literal, propositional, truth-functional content of an utterance.<\/p>\n

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<\/em>, which \u2018connects items unconnected through the ordinary grammar [\u2026] based on common knowledge or [\u2026] analogy\u2019 [35], and futaku<\/em>, <\/em>which is \u2018a method for expressing one\u2019s feelings by borrowing something concrete\u2019 [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.<\/p>\n

Of interest is M\u2019s discussion of the utterance-final expression mitaina<\/em> \u2018it seems\u2019, which is used by younger speakers as a modal operator that functions to disclaim personal responsibility for what has just been asserted\u2014even if the content of the assertion is the speaker\u2019s 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\u2019attayo<\/em> \u2018I seem to be ok\u2019. M takes this as characteristic of contemporary Japanese youth as well as a symptom of social and psychological insecurity.<\/p>\n

The conclusions are impaired by M\u2019s 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<\/em> \u2018Romanization\u2019 and Japanese mazegaki<\/em> (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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Linguistic creativity in Japanese discourse: Exploring the multiplicity of self, perspective, and voice. By Senko K. Maynard. (Pragmatics & beyond new series 159.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007. Pp. xvi, 356. ISBN 9789027254023. $165 (Hb). Reviewed by R. A. Brown, Bunkyo University and Waseda University, Japan With some notable exceptions, linguistic field workers have primarily relied […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=847"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":848,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847\/revisions\/848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}