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ISSN 1798-4769 Journal of Language Teaching and Research, Vol. 3, No. 4, pp. 593-598, July 2012 © 2012 ACADEMY PUBLISHER Manufactured in Finland. doi:10.4304/jltr.3.4.593-598 Marking of Speech Act Distinctions in Japanese and English © 2012 ACADEMY PUBLISHER Masanori Deguchi Western Washington University, U.S.A. Email: masanori.deguchi@wwu.edu Abstract—The present study examines differences between Japanese and English with respect to speech act distinctions. In particular, the two languages are contrasted with each other in terms of overt realizations of such distinctions. It is then shown that speech act distinctions are more robustly realized overtly in Japanese than in English. The main goal of this paper is twofold. First, I show why the difference between the two languages in terms of overt marking of speech act distinctions poses a significant challenge for speakers of English to learn Japanese. Second, I demonstrate that the difference in question is more prevalent than it is usually assumed, implying that the challenge that learners face is also more prevalent. It is thus my hope to raise the awareness of this challenge among instructors as well as among students. Index Terms—speech act, sentence types, sentence final particles (SFPs), Japanese, English I. INTRODUCTION When a speaker makes an utterance, s/he carries out a speech act, such as the act of making a statement or the act of informing the address of a fact. As the number of distinct speech acts far exceeds the number of distinct sentence types, a single sentence type generally takes on multiple speech acts. For example, the sentence type „declarative‟ can be used for making a statement, or informing the addressee of a fact among other speech acts. In other words, each sentence type is “underspecified” for speech act distinctions (cf. Clark, 1996). While this observation holds true for any language, it applies to different degrees, depending on the language. In other words, more speech act distinctions are overtly made in some languages than others. In the present paper, I show that Japanese makes more overt distinctions than English. I also discuss why this difference between the two languages poses a serious difficulty for English speakers learning Japanese. II. PRELIMINARIES A. Major Sentence Types and Speech Act Distinctions It is crucial to make a clear distinction between sentence types and speech act distinctions. Different sentence types, such as declaratives or interrogatives, differ from one another in form. In contrast, different speech acts, such as (making) a statement or (asking) a question, refer to functions; different functions may or may not be associated with distinct forms (i.e., distinct sentence types). We will discuss specific examples of “mismatches” between form and function in the relevant sense later in this section. Three major sentence types are traditionally recognized: declarative, interrogative, and imperative sentences (König and Siemund, 2007). 1 Both English and Japanese distinguish these three sentence types overtly. English marks these distinctions syntactically whereas Japanese does so morpho-syntactically as illustrated in (1) and (2), respectively. (1) Major sentence types in English a. Mary made pizza. b. Did Mary make pizza? c. Make pizza! (2) Major sentence types in Japanese a. Hanako-wa piza-o tsukut-ta. Hanako-TOP pizza-ACC make-PST „Hanako make pizza.‟ b. Hanako-wa piza-o tsukut-ta-no. Hanako-TOP pizza-ACC make-PST-Q „Did Hanako make pizza?‟ c. Piza-o tsukure. pizza-ACC make.IMP 1 König and Siemund (2007) point out that the three-way distinction is also reflected in punctuations in languages, such as English: the period (.), the question mark (?), and the exclamation point (!).
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Cognitive Styles and Performance on
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