Paper short abstract:

Based on analyses of actual face-to-face and telephone conversational interactions, I explore and show how Japanese speakers produce and make interpretable affective stance displays in their everyday interactions by means of contextually situated combinations of verbal resources.

Paper long abstract:

For a long time, mainstream linguistics was "dominated by the intellectualist prejudice that language is, essentially, if not solely, an instrument for the expression of propositional thought" (Lyons 1982:103) and its theories and methods have been heavily influenced by 'the written language bias' (Linell 1982). Consequently, affect has commonly been viewed as "too slippery an area of language for 'scientific' investigation" and "consistently set aside as an essentially unexplorable aspect of linguistic behaviour" (Besnier 1990:420). It has since transpired that any element of the linguistic system may be mobilized for affective stance display and that, as Sorjonen and Peräkylä (2012:9) emphasize, "it is not single resources in isolation but the cooccurrence of resources from different modalities and levels of modality that display emotional stances and their intensity […] at specifiable places in interaction".

In this paper, I explore and demonstrate how Japanese speakers produce and make interpretable affective stance displays in their everyday conversational interactions by means of contextually situated combinations of verbal (and certain vocal) resources. The individual resources and combinations may be conventionalized to different degrees. Whereas some of the resources, such as affect-descriptive adjectives, are quite transparent, there is a large number of resources whose function is not primarily thought to be that of means used for affective stance display. Some express specific affective stances, others serve as affective markers or contextualization cues (sensu Gumperz 1982) that make discourse interpretable as affectively charged, they may specify the intensity of otherwise expressed affects, etc.

The paper is based on close analyses of recordings of spontaneous face-to-face and telephone conversational interactions between Japanese young people who identify as friends. The approach I take is informed mainly by conversation analysis and interactional linguistics, while the subject matter I concern myself with in this paper forms a part of my larger research project focusing on affective stance display and affiliation management in Japanese social interaction.