Repairing Tales from Japan: Changes Over Time in Personal Narratives

• Authors: Timothy Riney
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

At two different times, Time 1 and Time 2, 13 participants in Japan (8 Japanese and 5 Americans) were asked to spontaneously respond in English to this prompt: "Tell me about one of the most exciting or dangerous moments in your life." The Japanese responded during their first and fourth years of college, which involved an interval of 42 months. The Americans were native speakers of English and responded earlier and later in their one year study abroad program in Japanese language and culture. Three questions addressed by this paper were the following: (a) What types of topics and narrative structures characterize these 26 stories? (b) What types of speaker-initiated repairs appear, and are the repairs the same or different at Time 1 and Time 2? (c) How are the repairs related to different listener (American, Japanese, Filipino, and Taiwanese) assessments of the intelligibility of the narratives?

Keywords

EN

Japanese; pragmatics; personal narrative; repairs; intelligibility

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Łódzki. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
• Journal: Research in Language
• Year: 2011
• Volume: 9
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 19-28

Dates

published

2011-12-01

online

2012-01-02

Contributors

author

Timothy Riney

• International Christian University

References

• Holmes, Janet. 1998. "Narrative structure: Some contrasts between Maori and Pakeha story-telling." Multilingua, 17 (1): 25-57.[Crossref]
• Labov, William and Waletsky, Joshua. 1967. "Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience." In Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts: Proceedings of the 1966 Annual Spring Meeting of the American Ethnological Society, June Helm (ed), 12-44. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.
• Munro, Murray. 2008. "Foreign accent and speech intelligibility." In Phonology and Second Language Acquisition, Jette G Hansen Edwards and Mary L. Zampini (eds), 193-217. Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.
• Riney, Timothy J., Takagi, Naoyuki and Inutsuka, Kumiko. 2005. "Phonetic parameters and perceptual judgments of accent in English by American and Japanese listeners." TESOL Quarterly, 39 (3): 441-466.[Crossref]
• Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1997. "'Narrative analysis' thirty years later." The Journal of Narrative and Life History 7 (1):1-4.

Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/v10015-011-0022-0