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Paper short abstract:

In this paper, the MFT corpus was analyzed in terms of structure and interactional functions, focusing on back-channeling, confirmations, questions and tsukkomi. Furthermore, three distinct patterns of tsukkomi was established, confirming that tsukkomi is a part of social interaction in Japanese.

Paper long abstract:

Tsukkomi is said to be an indispensable component of Japanese humour. However, very little has been explored scientifically in regards to the pragmatic functions of tsukkomi in conversation among everyday people.

This void in research is most likely due to the lack of easily accessible corpus data on tsukkomi because there are no corpora available with tags such as boke or tsukkomi.

The My Funny Talk Corpus developed by Sadanobu at Kobe University is a blessing in this respect; the corpus is an audio-visual collection of talks about three minutes in length entered in a funny-talk tournament with speaking styles rarely addressed in standard spoken-language corpora. It consists of 248 entries in which ordinary speakers of Japanese get together and talk about their funny stories while being videotaped, bound to include instances of tsukkomi and suitable for an investigation of interaction in humorous conversations.

In this paper, all the videos and transcripts of this corpus were analyzed considering the following research questions: (1) What is the structure, and what kind of patterns of tsukkomi can be found in the My Funny Talk Corpus? (2) What are the interactional functions of these patterns?

The analysis showed that because of the format of the funny-talk contest being as it is with the contestants introducing their funny stories to others, there were little cooperative turn taking per se, but there was certainly interaction in almost all clips, with the following patterns being observed in order of frequency; back-channeling, confirmations, questions and tsukkomi.

Furthermore, three distinct patterns of tsukkomi could be found in the corpus; the traditional pattern where the storyteller says something odd to which the others react; the self-tsukkomi pattern where the storyteller reacts himself to something odd in his or her own story; the embedded pattern, where the story teller refers to something odd and the tsukkomi reaction from a third person perspective.

Thus, this paper confirms that tsukkomi is a part of social interaction in Japanese, but at the same time suggests that not all patterns of tsukkomi are related to turn-taking, but rather serve as components in Japanese joke structure.

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Paper short abstract:

最近、尊敬語のつもりで謙譲語を用いた誤用が多くみられる。2016年９月には安倍首相が、「陛下が国民に向けてご発言されたこと…」と述べて、新聞にもそのまま載った。 尊敬表現なら、「ご発言をされた」か、「発言された」であるはずのところである。 介護記録の中にも尊敬語のつもりで、「○○さんが申した」のような記載がある。一方で文化庁の調査では、敬語は簡素化する方がいいという意見26.1%に対して、豊かな表現を大切にすべきとの意見が64.1％となっている。こうした最近の日本語の中の敬語の混乱について具体例をもとに考察する。

Paper long abstract:

There was an article in the newspaper about Prime Minister Abe's comment regarding Japanese Emperor Akihito's plan to abdicate the throne before he dies. Abe said, "we sincerely have received our emperor's statement (go-hatsugen sareta) toward Japanese citizen" (Mainichi 2016). We see another misuse of honorifics in articles regarding the royal family in the December issue of Bungei Shunjü of 2015. It said, "right after Sayako got married (go-seikon sarete)," and "after Emperor and Empress visited (go-hōmon sarete) Saipan." These examples used humble forms instead of respectful forms.

We see many more examples of such misuse of humble forms in nursing care records. "A sensor has started. We lead (go-an'nai sasete itadaku) you to the bathroom." "When I said, 'wait,' s/he responded (to-mōsu) 'got it.'" There was a recent survey conducted by the ministry of education regarding the use of honorifics. It indicates that 26.1% of Japanese people think that honorifics should be simple and easy to understand, but that 64.1% of people think that rich expressions (meaning honorifics) should be treated as important. It is interesting to know that Japanese people frequently misuse honorifics (reality) while they want to reserve the use of honorifics (ideal). My paper is to examine the background of the actual misuse of honorifics in recent Japanese.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the everyday practice of translanguaging at a department of liberal arts in Kyoto. Ethnographic data reveal how identities and ideologies of the community members are constructed by everyday communicative practices.

Paper long abstract:

This chapter examines the everyday practice of translanguaging at a department of liberal arts in Kyoto, an undergraduate college of rich linguistic diversity. The two hundred students enrolled in the bachelor of arts program as a group boast a collective linguistic repertoire of over three dozen "named" languages and dialects, a resource with which the social life of the community is negotiated and transformed daily.

Over a five-month period, four members of this linguistic community-- three students (Salem Young, Anh Đỗ Ngọc, and Shinnosuke Taguchi) together with one faculty member (Greg Poole)-- collaborated on a linguistic ethnography of participant observation, informal interviews, and audio recordings to collect a broad set of spoken data, a corpus that was then transcribed for microanalysis of linguistic features. Our approach follows a Hymesian SPEAKING methodology (1972); as "indigenous" ethnographers we exploited our insider status in order to investigate how the community members employ their linguistic resources and modalities in the various spaces and zones of translanguaging both on and off the Kyoto campus.

Underpinning this ethnographic work is the understanding that communicative practices in everyday college life in Japan embody a multilingualism that is not merely the pluralization of monolingualism (Pennycook 2010), but rather demonstrates a translanguaging that deploys a speaker's full linguistic repertoire without necessarily focusing on politically-defined boundaries of "named" languages (Otheguy, Garcia, Reed 2015). We were especially interested to discover that linguistic identities and ideologies of the community members are constructed, and deconstructed, by the everyday communicative practices we observed and recorded. This fluid identity construction-- situationally dependent on the formal and informal settings and scenes of the translingual speech events-- reflects both a deliberate and unconscious presentation of the language repertoires performed by the social actors (Goffman 1959). Whilst not always following boundaries of national citizenship and "named" languages, translanguaging nevertheless exposes linguistic and educational disparity within the community of students and teachers.