Japanese Communication: Language and Thought in Context

10 Relationality and Language-Associated Thought

165 10 Relationality and Language-Associated Thought The characteristics of the Japanese language depicted in part 2 point to the importance of the underlying dynamic of relationality proposed in part 1 and mentioned repeatedly. Although it is natural to assume that individual differences exist in interpretation of and response to relationality cues, broad cross-cultural differences in understanding relationality also exist. Japan tends to be societyrelational ; America, self-relational. The Japanese language contains many built-in mechanisms for expressing messages cued by relationality. Japanese as a Society-Relational Language: A Summary Every language operates on the basis of some kind of relationality, and within the boundaries of a single language, different degrees of importance are placed on relationality. For example, formal written communication (official documents, scientific reports, and so on), although essentially relational, maintains a relatively rigid form and is only slightly expressive in response to contextual relationality cues. Casual face-to-face conversation, which includes extensive verbal and nonverbal information, responds more fully to varied contextual and social relationality cues. Even given this intracultural variability, however, it is possible to identify a characteristically Japanese variety of relationality. Part 2 examined items selected from contemporary Japanese language, each reflecting, to varying degrees, the Japanese society- 166 Japanese Thought in Context relational orientation. A summary of how Japanese reflects relationality follows. 1. Styles change depending on interpersonal, social, and situational context. This shows the language’s overt response to the relation it holds to context, for example, politeness, honorifics, masculine/feminine speech, and so on. 2. Certain phrases express the speaker’s personal and often emotional attitude toward the information and the addressee. These phrases reveal meaning that is motivated and/or encouraged by interpersonal relationality cues, for example, adverbs, interactional particles, sentimental words, and swear words. 3. Rather than prioritizing information only, the speaker’s perspective toward that information is overtly expressed, always taking the addressee’s point of view into account. Examples include topic-comment structure, sentence-final manipulation, verbs of giving and receiving, and passive sentences. 4. Rather than prioritizing the specification of who-does-what-towhom , the event as a whole is presented first in a nominal clause; then personal attitudes are added. This structural preference contributes to the rhetoric of commentation shown by topic-comment structure, nominalization and nominal predicates , and rhetorical structures. 5. Strategies abound to avoid unratified confrontation, and verbal expressions are constrained by interpersonal relationality cues, which the speaker recognizes. Speech styles that encourage interpersonal rapport reveal the importance of monitoring and collaboratively responding to others, for example, collaborative strategies, listener responses, joint head movement, silence, and ratified conflicts. Between Language and Thought How are modes of Japanese communication associated with the ways people think and feel in Japanese? Recall that the nature of the relationship between language and thought—whether language controls or influences a speaker’s thought, and how this process is related to culture—remains controversial. I believe that the way a language is coded encourages speakers to engage in those kinds of thinking and feeling that the codes of the language readily express. But the structure of language alone does not form one’s expressive Relationality and Language-Associated Thought 167 range. How one uses that language also encourages particular kinds of thinking and feeling. The relationship between language and thought can be understood as follows. If we accept John R. Searle’s (1995) view that language is essentially constitutive of a society’s institutional reality, we can posit that language is indispensable for establishing , understanding, and engaging in social realities. Social phenomena are simply too complex to be described or referred to without using language. Although some aspects of reality are language -independent, many others require language, which is capable of representing things beyond itself. Our conditioned social perceptions and conventionalized social rules skew our understanding of the world. It is uncertain whether we follow social rules consciously or unconsciously. According to Searle (1995, 145), social rules play a crucial role in explaining the behavior of a society’s members, because those members acquire the “disposition” associated with the rules. Social facts, which in part are built of language, influence members of a society to be disposed to understand, to behave, and to think in certain ways. Within a single language, though, we find expressions that point to contradictory orientations of thought, so the relationship of language and thought is far from simple. Words and structures...