This colloquium considers several approaches to analyzing language and social interaction in Japanese focusing on a rare corpus of ethnographic interview data collected over 27 years. The data set provides a unique opportunity to examine how language and interaction change over time in conjunction with life transitions of the participants moving from young adulthood to motherhood and in conjunction with participants’ transforming urban and social landscapes. The presentation combines explication of findings from analyses by our multidisciplinary team and reflections on how we can analyze longitudinal data of spoken language through different approaches including sociolinguistics, dialectology, discourse-functional linguistics, conversation analysis (CA) and interactional linguistics. The presentation introduces and demonstrates several analytic methods for understanding transformations, and their implications for understanding evolving Japanese discourse strategies and practices.
This study is part of a larger research project exploring an ongoing series of ethnographic interviews. This colloquium focuses on a cross-section of encounters between Kanako (pseudonym) and the researcher that took place in intervals of 3-6 years between 1989 (age 18) and 2016 (age 44). During this period, Kanako graduated from high school, married and had three children, divorced, established a professional career, remarried and had two more children.
The first paper investigates the grammatical variations such as negative suffixes, aspect markers, modality markers and copula of Kobe dialect used by Kanako through dialectology and sociolinguistic approaches. The second paper employs a discourse analytic approach and examines variants such as clause-final forms, honorifics, interactional particles and morphological features of Kobe dialect in the two interlocutors’ recurring encounters to demonstrate Kanako’s shifting approaches to stance-taking in different speech activities. Using the frameworks of CA and interactional linguistics, the third paper explores responses to polar questions, specifically focusing on recurring questions such as “Are you happy now?”
This colloquium furthers our understanding of (1) how different approaches can be employed to analyze the longitudinal conversational data, and (2) how speakers adjust their language and interactional styles as they mature. The analyses contribute to research on panel studies, sociolinguistics and CA in understanding language variation and language transformation through individuals’ lives in Japan.
