What Japanese Native Speakers Actually Do in Thanking Episodes in Naturally Occurring Telephone Conversations

Abstract

In this chapter, I will investigate naturally occurring telephone conversations based on the assumptions that any natural conversational data sets are artefacts reflecting social norms (certain expected ways of doing things in a given community), intentions, the relationships of the participants at a given time in a specific context, and as they engage in conversation, meaning is negotiated and co-constructed. Face, therefore, becomes more salient in motivating conversational participants to opt for certain social and linguistic behaviours. In other words, ‘face consideration’ can be a prominent determiner of how people interact in real-life speech events. The DCT and the role-play data successfully fulfil their roles in providing us with information regarding how participants perceive the given thanking episodes and how they think they may speak and behave, and as a result some regularities, or ‘norms’, are obtained. Here, the notion of ‘norms’ is considered as empirically grounded common ways of doing things as found in the previous two studies, and norms will be used in this chapter to understand meaning in interaction. The informants did not have to pay much attention to nurturing interpersonal relationships in the previous two studies, as they knew no matter what they say to each other in a make-believe situation, no genuine harm would be done.¹