본문 바로가기
  • Home
Basic Search

What do we owe to context?: Incomplete sentences and differences in communication between Japan and Korea

  • The Japanese Language Association of Korea
  • Abbr : JLAK
  • 2024, (80), pp.105-122
  • DOI : 10.14817/jlak.2024.80.105
  • Publisher : The Japanese Language Association Of Korea
  • Research Area : Humanities > Japanese Language and Literature
  • Received : April 12, 2024
  • Accepted : May 17, 2024
  • Published : June 20, 2024

윤성희 1

1関西学院大学国際学部

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper examines data on what will be referred to as “incomplete sentences” in Japanese and Korean, in order to analyze what parts of communication become context-dependent, and how this leads to cultural differences in this regard between Japanese and Korean communication styles. It begins by defining what it means for a sentence to be incomplete, and argues, based on this definition, that contrasting examples from Japanese and Korean provide clues to find some differences in how speakers of the two languages communicate. When constructing a sentence to convey a given message, including all potential information related to this message is highly inefficient. This means that it is more economic to omit or retain certain components, depending on what aspects of the message the speaker deems important to convey. These choices around what to include result in actual communication involving a wide range of many different types of sentences—from those with subjects and predicates to those missing some elements, even down to one-word sentences like “Ball!” Moreover, when a part or all of a predicate is truncated, certain morphosyntactic constraints arise from the elimination, limiting the range of meanings and functions that might be explicitly represented through linguistic encoding. Such examples of incomplete predicates can be observed in various genres in both spoken and written forms in the two languages; however, the phenomenon is more frequent and pervasive in Japanese than in Korean. This fact suggests that Japanese tends to underrepresent certain information typically encoded in the predicate, such as actions or events, compared to Korean. Information that is not explicitly encoded requires inference based on context, which, in turn, leads to some of the well-known differences in communication styles between the two cultures, such as the common perception by Japanese people that Koreans speak very directly.

Statistics

  • 97 Viewed
  • 0 Downloaded

Tools

Issue List

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

Basic Search Advanced Search