This article begins with a review of the history of contrastive studies of Japanese-Korean language communication, which can be divided into three distinct phases. In recent years, researchers working on language contact problems between Japanese and Korean speakers have accumulated a large quantity of significant data from observations of discourse expressions. However, there was no descriptive model that could adequately explain these observations. Our research group, therefore, wrote a book in which we proposed a Synchronous Grouping Model, which focuses on the four layers of social culture, attitudes, discourse content and discourse expression.
Type description is important because the linguistic unit of discourse is hyper-segmental. According to cognitive linguistics, the way people see, think and feel is inherent in the language mechanism.
Sociolinguistics, on the other hand, investigates the relationship between language and society, which is to say the relationship between the speaker, the listener and their shared situation. By integrating these two approaches, we devised a new model, which we call Discourse Construction Attitudes, which is a descriptive type. Here, we show how it is possible to explain the nature of genre units through an understanding of the differences in Discourse Construction Attitudes. The linguistic unit known as a ‘request’, for example, has different genre characteristics in Japan, Korea and China.
Contrastive linguistics can also function as a method. It is, therefore, possible to explain the Japanese-Korean differences found in similar genres by using observational studies of language contact. If we can take genre to be the semantic unit of discourse, this also suggests the usefulness of introspective analysis. Finally, it is important to note that the study of language contact between speakers of different languages and cultures has become an essential model of language communication.