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Tell me about when you were hitchhiking: The organization of story initiation by Australian and Japanese speakers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 March 2007

YASUNARI FUJII
YASUNARI FUJII
Affiliation:
School of Science and Engineering, Tokyo Denki University, Ishizaka, Hatoyama-machi, Hiki-gun, Saitama, Japan 350-0394, [email protected]
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Abstract

The sequence that begins a story may be a rather small segment, but how one performs the segment may affect whether one achieves the goal of telling the story. The participants in this study are native speakers of Australian English and Japanese, and the stories were collected in both languages. In recipient-initiated stories, Australian speakers begin a story in concert with the recipient's topic presentation, but Japanese speakers build momentum through the building of rapport and trust. In speaker-initiated stories, Australian speakers use a conventional story preface to claim the conversational floor, but Japanese speakers insinuate a story in subtle ways. Such differences may be related to differences between Australian and Japanese social and cultural structures. The final section discusses implications for conversation analysis in addition to cross-cultural issues.I am pleased to acknowledge the assistance of Felicita Carr and Pascale Jacq for their help with transcripts, and Gavin Fryer, Malcolm Mearns, Johanna Rendle-Short, and the editor and anonymous referees of Language in Society for their comments, input, and encouragement.

Keywords

story initiationconversation analysisAustralian EnglishJapaneselanguage and culture
Type
Research Article
Information
Language in Society , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , April 2007 , pp. 183 - 211
Copyright
© 2007 Cambridge University Press

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