relationality

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::: in her linguistics book, japanese communication: language and thought in context (honolulu: university of hawaii press, 1997), professor senko k. maynard presents the findings of an interesting study aimed at analyzing the interactionality of the japanese language...

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...the subjects of the study were twenty pairs of native japanese speakers...each pair held a 60-minute conversation in japanese...the linguistic data drawn from each documented conversation were as follows:

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...on average, each conversation included 1,244 sentences and 2,112 phrases (bounded by pauses)...interactional particles (ne, sa, no, yo, na, among the majors) appeared once in every 2.5 phrase-final positions...

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...arguing that in the japanese language these interactional particles play an important function as relational cues between speakers, professor maynard presented the following data re interactional particles from her study:

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...of the 2,112 phrases exchanged on average during the 6o-minute conversations:

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• ne appeared 364 times (attached to 42% of the phrases exchanged)

• sa appeared 148 times (17%)

• no appeared 138 times (16%)

• yo appeared 128 times (15%)

• na appeared 49 times (6%)

• other particles appeared 36 times (4%)

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...for those interested in japanese language and/or linguistics, maynard's findings are interesting insofar as they confirm the interaction-oriented nature of japanese language (and, by extension, japanese culture)...

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...maynard assigns the particle yo as "information-oriented," positing that yo "is used when the speaker assumes that he or she has more access to and/or possession of the information and wants to focus on the information conveyed in the utterance"...conversely, maynard assigns the particle ne as "interaction-oriented," proposing that ne "is chosen when the speaker assumes that he or she has less (or about the same amount of) access to and/or possession of the information and wishes to concentrate on feelings and attitudes more than on information"...

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...based on these assigned values (and other studies), maynard concludes that japanese speakers communicate primarily -- indeed at a statistical rate of 3 to 1 -- for the purpose of interaction, less so information, concentrating on the feelings and attitudes exchanged in the conversation rather than the information transmitted...

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