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Current trends and prospects of studies on Japanese pragmatics and sociolinguistics
The Japanese Language Association of Korea
Abbr :
JLAK
2017, (51), pp.41-56
Publisher : The Japanese Language Association Of Korea
Research Area : Japanese Language and Literature
2017, (51), pp.41-56
Publisher : The Japanese Language Association Of Korea
Research Area : Japanese Language and Literature
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This paper reviews researches of pragmatics/sociolinguistics through analysis of 122 research articles published in 2015 and 2016 in Korea. Classification of keywords of these articles reveals that ‘Contrastive discourse analysis between Korean and Japanese’ is a characteristic of researches on pragmatics/sociolinguistics in Korea. It further shows a tendency for many keywords to be related to the field of (i) communicational functions between Korean and Japanese, (ii) speech act strategies in a first-meeting contact situation, and (iii) second language acquisition. In the area of Contrastive Discourse Analysis, many studies regard the social practicality as their research significance, for their findings can help resolve issues of conflict or misunderstandings in communication. The trend has been situation-descriptive contrastive research that is motivated by ‘what and how speakers utter’. While a large portion of these researches are devoted to exploring linguistic strategies on the basis of the Politeness Theory, only few researches take an approach of the Variation Theory in terms of how a speaker choose different linguistic forms in diverse situations. Further, there are some studies authored by Japanese researchers who live in Korea which investigate the differences between Korean and Japanese in the culture of apology by addressing common trends that are often unnoticed by Korean people. These studies are innovative in the sense that they constitute cultural research without much influence from linguistic theories. Research of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) has developed from acquisition to maintenance and attrition, based on a fundamental goal to discover rules in the interlanguage of learners. However, research on acquisition of sociolinguistic competence is yet to be explored. Its research is an urgent matter for the SLA literature since it is an important competence for Japanese learners to establish and maintain interpersonal networks using Japanese. A veteran researcher once said “Contrastive research of empirical linguistic behaviour between Korean and Japanese is still lacking both in terms of the qualitative and quantitative points of view”. This seems still to be valid even though many detailed aspects of linguistic behaviour in Korean and Japanese people have been made clear through the efforts of numerous researchers. Further, while there are many researches that aim to observe and describe particular linguistic behaviours, little attention has been paid to ground-analysis-type research as to how and why those languages behave in such a way.
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