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Speaker's sex or discourse activities? A micro-discourse-based account of usage of nonparticle questions in Japanese

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 May 2006

MISAO OKADA
MISAO OKADA
Affiliation:
Hokusei Gakuen University, 2-3-1, Oyachi-nishi, Atsubetsu-ku, Sapporo, 004-8631 Japan, [email protected]
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Abstract

A micro-discourse-based approach is employed to examine the usage of nonparticle questions (e.g., ii? ‘{Is that} okay?’) in Japanese university orchestra meetings. Women appear to ask such questions more often than men do there. It is shown that a detailed discourse analysis, including participants' talk, nonvocal behaviors, and the use of documents, can uncover how superficially sex-linked usage arises from differences in speakers' activities at the moment. By means of both sequential and quantitative analyses of 140 nonparticle questions, it is demonstrated that their use with different frequencies by women and men is not a direct consequence of the sex of the speaker per se. Rather, the speakers' engagement in activities specific to particular discourses (e.g., note-taking) affects their opportunities to ask nonparticle questions.I would like to express my appreciation to my former academic adviser, Amy Sheldon of the University of Minnesota, and to the other members of my dissertation committee, Junko Mori, Betsy Kerr, Jeanette Gundel, and Bruce Downing, for their invaluable comments on earlier versions of this article. I am also grateful to the editor of the journal and two anonymous reviewers of this article who helped me to refocus the argumentation. I also appreciate the help of Anthony Backhouse, Marjorie Harness Goodwin, Jane Hill, Noël R. Houck, Hiroaki Ishiguro, Etsuko Oishi, and Tomoharu Yanagimachi, who gave me useful and insightful suggestions. I also thank Anne-Marie Cusac and Jane McGary, who made many stylistic changes. I am solely responsible for any problems that remain in this article. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2001 annual meeting of American Association for Applied Linguistics in St. Louis, Missouri. A related but different article concerning functions of nonparticle questions appeared as Okada 2005 in the Bulletin of Fuji Women's University 42 (Series I).

Keywords

genderquestionsmicro-discourse analysisdiscourse activities
Type
Research Article
Information
Language in Society , Volume 35 , Issue 3 , July 2006 , pp. 341 - 365
Copyright
© 2006 Cambridge University Press

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