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Exploring Senpai-Koohai Relationships in Club Meetings in a Japanese University a Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Divisio EXPLORING SENPAI-KOOHAI RELATIONSHIPS IN CLUB MEETINGS IN A JAPANESE UNIVERSITY A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I AT MĀNOA IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN LINGUISTICS MAY 2013 By Yumiko Enyo Dissertation Committee: Haruko Minegishi Cook, Chairperson Victoria Anderson Christina Higgins Gabriele Kasper David Ericson ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Writing this dissertation has been a long process that involves many people, which makes it impossible to mention everyone that I would like to thank. I will simply note several people as a token of my appreciation, but I also would like to express my sincere appreciation to all the people surrounding my life, because all of my friends and family members have always been supportive of this project. First of all, I could not even have started this dissertation without my advisor, Dr. Haruko Minegishi Cook. With her series of studies on speech styles, she has been my inspiration from the earliest point of my dissertation writing process. My knowledge about this dissertation topic owes much to her keen insights. She has been extraordinarily generous in her support of my work, not only during my life in Honolulu as a student but also extending into my current life in Sapporo, Japan. I am deeply appreciative of her support. Each of my committee members has been a part of my writing process in different ways. Dr. Victoria Anderson has always been a strong supporter from the early stages of my graduate program, professionally and emotionally. Her passion has been so contagious that it created a network among the graduate students, who have also been great supporters during my dissertation writing. Dr. Gabriele Kasper has opened my eyes to the world of discourse analysis with her deep understanding of its issues. Her insights into my work during my writing process have been invaluable. It is my hope that I have been able to reflect what I learned from her in my work. Dr. Christina Higgins is the first person who came to support me during the challenging time of change in my dissertation committee. Her expertise in styles also broadened my views on issues of speech styles, iii and her helpful comments for my dissertation proposal lead me in the right direction. Finally, the outside member of my committee, Dr. David Ericson, has always expressed his interest in my dissertation, and I appreciate his generous mind and his borderless interest in the field. Both Dr. Mike Forman and Dr. Andrew Wong were committee members at the early stage of my Ph.D. program, and I owe much to their help. Study groups, such as Japanese sociolinguistics with Dr. Cook, have given me excellent feedback when I shared some parts of the dissertation data. Many students who were involved in study groups, as well as other informal gatherings across disciplines, have provided me useful comments and critiques that helped me narrow down my focus to the important issues for the dissertation. I am thankful to all my colleagues and friends who have always been there to support me in many ways. Among them, my editor, Laurie Durand, has been an indispensable person for this dissertation writing and other professional papers. I would like to add that it is through the networks of my friends, as well as the participants who were willing to help me, that I was able to collect this dissertation data. Without their support, this dissertation project could not even have started. Finally, I would like to express my appreciation to my father Michio, my mother Reiko, and my two sisters, Hiroko and Kazuko. I am fortunate to have a very supportive family, and they are the source of the energy with which I move forward. iv ABSTRACT Japanese hierarchical relations called senpai-koohai ‘senior-junior’, which in school are based on different class standings, have been observed to be salient and stable across different situations beyond school, once such relations are built between a pair of people (Dunn, 1996; Nakane, 1967/1972). However, presuming that such relations are static in nature is problematic in light of social constructionist views, especially because there are no studies that examine college students’ dyadic or multiparty interactions in terms of their hierarchical relationship building. This dissertation examines how college students of different class levels interact in practice by analyzing multiparty interactions during an extracurricular activity at a Japanese college. Drawing on indexicality approaches (Ochs, 1992, 1993; Silverstein, 1983), I focus on three linguistic forms: speech styles, address and reference terms, and knowledge-related stance markers. The results of the analyses suggest that the construction of senpai-koohai relationships is influenced by two types of context of talk, on-stage and off-stage. During on-stage talk, the participants’ club roles are foregrounded, which puts less focus on their senpai-koohai identities. During off- stage talk, their identities are less influenced by their club roles, and this situation allows more freedom for other identities, which include senpai-koohai, to be constructed. A speaker’s use of linguistic forms can be indexical to the context, while the meaning of a linguistic form is under the influence of the context. Moreover, the construction of senpai-koohai relations is also influenced by the content of the conversation. Overall, this dissertation demonstrates that, in the data analyzed, senpai-koohai relations among college students are much more fluid in nature than has been shown in previous studies. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ………………………………………………………… ii ABSTRACT …………………………………….…………………………………... iv LIST OF TABLES …………………………………….…………………………..... vii LIST OF FIGURES …………………………………….…………………………... viii LIST OF TRANSCRIPTION CONVENTIONS ……….………………………..… ix LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS USED IN WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSLATIONS ………. x CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION ………………………………..………………… 1 1.1 Statement of the Problem …………………….…….………………….. 1 1.2 Senpai and koohai in Japanese colleges……………………………..…. 7 1.3 Goals of the study ………………………………….….……………….. 16 CHAPTER 2. INDEXICALITY …………………………………….…….……… 21 2.1 Premises of indexicality …………………………………….………..… 21 2.2 Indexing identities …………………………………….……………..… 27 CHAPTER 3. JAPANESE SPEECH STYLES ……………………………….…… 32 3.1 Traditional accounts of Japanese speech styles …………………….….. 32 3.2 Japanese speech styles and identities …………………………………... 39 3.3 Meanings of the masu and the plain form found in naturally occurring data .. ……. 40 CHAPTER 4. DATA AND METHOD OF ANALYSIS ……………………….…. 46 4.1 The movie club in a Japanese university …………………………..…… 46 4.1.1 Demographic information for the movie club ……………….. 46 4.1.2 Recording the club meetings …………………………………. 48 4.2 Method of analysis …………………………………….……………….. 54 4.2.1 Context, frame, and identities in this study …………………... 54 4.2.2 Description of analysis methods …………………………….... 57 CHAPTER 5. ON- AND OFF-STAGE TALK IN THE MEETINGS ..…………… 58 5.1 The participation structure of the meetings …………………………….. 58 5.2 On-stage talk as masu form-based interactions ………………………… 61 5.3 Off-stage talk as non-naked plain form-based interactions……..……..... 71 5.3.1 Off-stage talk with non-hierarchical relationships ……..…...... 72 vi 5.3.2 Indexing of senpai-koohai relationships by speech style in off-stage talk …………….…….…….…….…….…….. 81 5.4 Chapter conclusion …………………………………….…………….... 88 CHAPTER 6. ADDRESS AND REFERENT TERMS AS RESOURCES FOR SENPAI-KOOHAI RELATIONSHIPS ………………...…….….…… 90 6.1 Introduction …………………………………….……………………… 90 6.2 Japanese address and reference terms …………………………………. 92 6.3 Uses of address and reference terms among the movie club members…. 97 6.4 FN-san and FN-chan: The difference between on- and off-stage talk….100 6.5 FN-chan as a resource for senpai-koohai relationships…………………105 6.6 Bare FN and LN as resources for a senpai and a male koohai relationship …….. 115 6.7 Chapter conclusion …………………………………….…………….... 121 CHAPTER 7. SENPAI AS A KNOWLEGEABLE PARTY ………………………123 7.1 Introduction …………………………………….………………………123 7.2 The senpai identity and being a knowledgeable party ………………….124 7.3 Non-hierarchical relations and the absence of strong epistemic markers.133 7.4 Chapter conclusion …………………………………….………………..137 CHAPTER 8. CONCLUSION …………………………………….……………..... 139 REFERENCES …………………………………….…………………………….... 143 vii LIST OF TABLES Table Page 3.1 Three clause types and gerunds in the masu and plain forms …………….... 33 4.1 Description of three meeting sessions ……………….…………………….. 50 4.2 Names and background of participants ……………….……….................... 51 5.1 Summary of Shoo’s monologue of Excerpt 4 ……………….…………….. 69 5.2 Summary of on- and off-stage talk and speech styles …………….……….. 89 6.1 Summary of normative use of three suffixes…………….…………………. 93 6.2 Summary of participants’ use of address and reference terms ……..……… 98 viii LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1.1 Japanese writing of senpai and koohai ……………….……..……………… 8 2.1 Silverstein’s functional characteristics of indexes …….…………………… 26 4.1 The site of the general meeting …….………………………………………. 52 4.2 The site of Sales Meeting 1 …….……………………………………….….. 52 5.1 Schematic illustration of participation structure in the sales meetings …….. 59 5.2 The structure of on-stage talk in club meeting discussions ...……………….. 63 ix LIST OF TRANSCRIPTION CONVENTIONS (modified from Cook 2008a, p. 16) [ overlapped speech = latching (.) unmeasured micropause ( ) unclear utterance (( )) commentary : sound stretch
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