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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 240

Part of Session 115: Discursive Construction of Emotion in Multilingual Interaction (Other abstracts in this session)

On Doing Japanese Awe in English Talk

Authors: Greer, Tim
Submitted by: Greer, Tim (Kobe University, Japan)

Based on a collection of cases taken from 12 hours of video-recorded interaction, this study examines some of the ways that Japanese novice L2 speakers of English employ prosodic variations of the information receipt particle “oh” to socially accomplish awe in L2 interaction.

“Oh” has been widely recognized in Conversation Analysis as a change-of-state token (Heritage, 1984), which speakers use to make an interactional claim to epistemic readjustment, or as Schegloff (2007: 118) explains it, going from “non-knowing” to “now-knowing”. However, in addition to marking such changes in knowledge states, it was noticed that the Japanese participants in the current data set also occasionally produced “oh” in ways that make public the speaker’s affective state with regard to the informing turn. Specifically, an “oh” response that is delivered as “ogh” or “uogh” or “worgh”, was taken by recipients to be conveying “surprise” or “awe”. Unlike the surprised receipts found in L1 English use (Local, 1996; Selting, 1996), these “awed receipts” were delivered with decreased pitch, and their vowel quality and sequential placement identified them as Japanese (L1) tokens.

In Japanese, the change-of-state token is usually expressed with “a” (Ikeda, 2007), whereas “ogh” and its variants are more akin to the sort of reactive tokens used to express surprise (see Wilkinson and Kitzinger, 2006). Through a fine-grained sequential analysis, the current study seeks to emically account for the way these participants use “oh” in their L2 English, demonstrating that they view it not simply as a change-of-state token, but as a means of “doing being awed”. The presenter will outline several interactional loci, including free-standing ogh, onset-delayed ogh, ogh-prefaced assessments and multiple oghs, all of which work to make public the speaker’s emotional stance toward some aspect of the prior interaction.

Although these awed-receipts are fundamentally an element of the speakers’ first-language, the novice speakers of English in this data set do not treat them as marked in anyway, which raises pedagogical questions of whether or not language teachers need to point out such displays of emotion, or indeed whether or not such reactions are teachable. The researcher’s position is that such reactive displays of emotion performed in L1 are usually inferable within their sequential context, and therefore constitute a point at which the two languages can comprehensibly meld, allowing L2 speakers to retain some of their linguistic and cultural identities while moving toward a multilingual mode of communication.