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Paper short abstract:

An investigation of natural conversations reveals that pragmatic knowledge, which cannot be acquired from the existing textbooks, is essential in Europe where Japanese is not the second language but a foreign language.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation focuses on the conjunctional auxiliaries kara and node manifested both in teaching materials for conversations and in natural conversations. It explores what the usages of these grammatical items suggest regarding the subjective and objective behaviors. It also points out that a choice between kara and node presupposes the vertical and horizontal relationships (power and solidarity) between two speakers. This study then investigates the validity of the reversal usage of kara and node through an examination of Lakoff's (1973) statement that a polite conversation exchanged between given two speakers with close relationship widens their psychological distance.

It is generally perceived that kara is subjevtive and node is objective (Nagano, 1952). Researchers employ this framework for understanding the choice between kara and node. For instance, Daijirin and The Dictionary of Japanese Sentence Structure state that kara is stronger than node in terms of subjectivity. Some researchers, however, are in direct opposition to this view and define kara as objective while node as subjective (Yamashita, 1986; Makino, 1996; Makino, 2007). This proposal begins by summarizing the preceding studies using "assertiveness". Employing an original scale "± assertiveness", it first investigates six textbooks for conversation to explore the presence of pragmatic knowledge. It then generates a check sheet for guiding a choice between kara and node in order to compare and contrast the textbooks for conversations and natural conversations through an investigation of the "BTSJ Conversation Corpus": 1) Thesis instructions between college professors and students, 2) Casual conversations between those who met for the first time and between friends, 3) Telephone conversations where female speakers declining a request, and 4) Telephone conversations including requests between the same sex (male/male and female/female).

CEFR indicates "socio-linguistic appropriateness". Yet, it does not seem to shed light on the role of pragmatic knowledge. An investigation of natural conversations reveals that pragmatic knowledge, which cannot be acquired from the existing textbooks, is essential in Europe where Japanese is not the second language but a foreign language.