Abstract Book of the 8th International Conference on Advanced Research in Social Sciences Studies
Year: 2025
DOI:
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Linguistic Strategies of Japanese Gay-Men: Warm Hearted Mock Impoliteness
Soichi Kozai
ABSTRACT:
Japanese enjoy watching mock impoliteness broadcasted on TV shows like the British do with The Weakest Link. Those mock impoliteness utterances produced by Anne Robinson are understood not to be true in a particular context, i.e., the TV show as Culpepper (1996) points out. Although mock impoliteness created by Japanese gay-men are also in the TV show, they always indicate the truth. The targeted listeners and the TV audience, however, welcome and even appreciate this mock impoliteness. In this study, I will show you how this Japanese bald-on-record negative FTA (Brown and Levinson 1987) can be regarded as mock impoliteness. Linguistic notions I use to account for it are empathy (Kuno 1976) and transitivity (Hopper and Thompson 1980). Verbal put-downs of Anne Robinson are straightforward without mincing her words. So are the Japanese gay-men’s, but their sentences are studded with linguistics devices to mitigate the rudeness and even create a strong link to the hearer. Their main clauses often end without main verbs, whereby the transitivity of the sentence get lowered to sound less affective or offensive. They frequently chose sentence final particles and markers to show shared information with the listener. These are the major linguistic tools they employ to accomplish the magic that seem contradictory – impolite while true. Speakers of the Japanese gay-men are, thus, being rude while they put themselves in other people’s shoes. This altruistic sensitivity, omoiyari (Travis 1998), may be responsible for the warm-hearted mock impoliteness in Japanese which its English counterpart does not have.
keywords: empathy, FTA, Japanese, shared-information, transitivity