Paper short abstract:

This study extracted expressions of laughter from a Russian novel and its Japanese translation, and performed a questionnaire for both native speakers to ask who the laughing person is. The result showed that Japanese has more expressions of laughter, related with the laughing person, than Russian.

Paper long abstract:

"Communication" has been regarded as being based on intention of behaviors. Recently, however, some specific speech wordings "Role language" have been reported, which are given to the speakers based on the speaker's sex, age, appearance, personality and image ("characters") regardless intention of the speaker by others, for example authors, translators, and among others. Some studies about "Role language" revealed that Japanese translators use "Role language" such as "Women's language" for standard utterances of Japanese non-native speakers. Further, Japanese has much more kinds of "Role language" than other languages, and a relation between "Role language" and the speakers' "characters" is stronger in Japanese than in other languages. Are these phenomena observed only in speech-act? How about in other behavior such as laughter?

This study tried to prove that Japanese has much more kinds of specific expressions which describe various ways of laughter than Russian language, and a relation between the expression and the laughing person's "character" is stronger in Japanese than in Russian language. This study extracted expressions of laughter such as "takawarai suru (to laugh loudly)", "gera-gera warau (to guffaw)" from a famous Russian novel "Crime and Punishment" by Dostoevsky and its Japanese translation version. Furthermore, then a questionnaire survey for Japanese and Russian native speakers was performed to ask who the appropriate person is for each expressions of laughter. As the result, the following things are revealed; Some Russian expressions of laughter are translated much more kinds of expressions in Japanese translation version depending on the laughing persons' "characters"; many Russian native speakers answered that they do not care who the laughing person is, but anyone can laugh by several ways depending on situation; on the other hand, many Japanese native speakers chose the appropriate person for each expression of laughter.This result suggest a possibility that Russian students of Japanese regard the expressions of laughter which are connected with specific "characters" as unmarked ones, and unintentionally use them, without education about them.