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Information to Users INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter free, while others may be from any type o f computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand comer and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Each original is also photographed in one exposure and is included in reduced form at the back of the book. Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Kgher quality 6” x 9” black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. UMI A Bell & Howell Infonnation Company 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor Ml 48106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600 REPORTING PROBLEMS AND OFFERING ASSISTANCE IN JAPANESE BUSINESS TRANSACTIONAL TELEPHONE CONVERSATIONS; TOWARD AN UNDERSTANDING OF A SPOKEN GENRE DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Lindsay Amthor Yotsukura, Ed.M, B.A. ***** The Ohio State University 1997 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Professor Charles J. Quinn, Jr., Advisor Professor Mari Noda Advisor Department of East Asian Professor Michael L. Geis Languîmes and Literatures UMI Number; 9801829 Copyright 1997 by Yotsukura, Lindsay Amthor All rights reserved. UMI Microform 9801829 Copyright 1997, by UMI Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 Copyright by Lindsay Amthor Yotsukura 1997 ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the reporting of problems and the offering of assistance by service recipients and service providers in Japanese business telephone conversations. The study is based on a data corpus of 100 hours of naturally occurring conversations of staff members employed at three commercial and three educational establishments in the Kanto and Kansai regions of Japan which were recorded over a period of several months in 1994 and 1995. Of this corpus, excerpts from 20 hours of recordings from one Tokyo company and 30 hours from one Kobe company have been transcribed and analyzed. At the heart of the investigation is a group of conversations exhibiting certain commonalities of compositional structure, style, and thematic content. Using Bakhtin’s definition of speech genres, it is argued that each of these texts represents an individual enactment of a particular genre, to be called Japanese business transactional telephone conversations (JBTCs). By considering genre in a manner similar to Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, or ‘lived habit,’ we can move away from the concrete, reified idea of ‘activity types,’ which unnecessarily consigns behavior to an unchangeable pattern that might be readily learned and applied without modification or practice cross-culturally, and instead adopt a more flexible approach that envisions genres as groups of behavioral and linguistic dispositions which both native and non-native speakers of a given language acquire through experience in particular settings on particular occasions. The purpose in doing so is twofold. First, for pedagogical purposes we seek to develop a model of how Japanese speakers make use of linguistic (viz., generic) resources in order to perform one particular activity in their daily work. The second goal is to provide a “thick description” of a small number of conversations as they occur in particular contexts, and which share a similar constellation of thematic, stylistic and compositional features. Familiarity with the JBTC genre and with the more specific subgenres of problem reporting and offering assistance, coupled with specific knowledge about the types of problems that might occur in conjunction with particular transactions in a particular business, enabled certain service recipients to highlight the salient points related to a problem through the use of contextualization cues. This often made it possible for service providers to perceive the problem prior to its explicit mention by the service recipient. The converse of this was also found to be true; in cases in which service providers were most familiar with one kind of transaction, the expectations they had developed through experience sometimes prompted them to misunderstand (or unintentionally ignore) the salient contextualization cues which the service recipient took pains to provide. When service providers sought to offer assistance toward the resolution of a problem, instances of either the consultative l-masyoo ka?J or the declarative l-masu no del forms were observed; in some cases, both occurred within the same encounter. The difference in distribution would seem to be most fundamentally related to the degree of knowledge the speaker had in regard to the problem being reported. Service providers adopted the i-masyoo ka?! pattern when seeking confirmation from the service recipient about the proposed service, either because there was insufficient information to judge what sort of behavior would be appropriate or because they wished to leave the final decision up to the service recipient. In contrast, service providers used the l-masu no del form to link the information marked with no in order to associate, refer, or even explain the present discourse situation with that n-marked information. The purpose in doing so was to provide a grounded reassurance of the speaker’s willingness and intention to perform the proposed service. Ill To my father and in memory of my mother IV ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the members of my Dissertation Committee, Professor Charles J. Quinn, Jr., Professor Mari Noda, and Professor Michael L. Geis for their guidance and encouragement not only during the research and writing stages of the thesis itself, but also throughout my academic career at The Ohio State University. Professor Quinn has been a constant source of inspiration and intellectual challenge as my primary academic advisor. Despite an extremely heavy workload and commitments to numerous advisees, he gave unsiintingly of his time, patience and advice. I am particularly grateful to him for pointing out to me the notion of genre as a potentially powerful tool for the analysis of texts and in the field of language pedagogy. Professor Noda has been a mentor to me both at Ohio State and during various summer language programs in the United States and Japan. Her insightful observations about language use have served as inspiration for this work, and her masterful teaching skills in the classroom have motivated me to continue to strive harder in this field. I am also indebted to her for helping to arrange for my affiliation with Professor Keisuke Maruyama at Doshisha Women’s University in Japan during the period of fieldwork from 1994 to 1995. My coursework and extensive discussions with Professor Geis have helped me to develop an understanding for research in the areas of speech act theory and conversation analysis. In particular I wish to acknowledge his comments and criticisms on numerous drafts of a paper which I presented at the Graduate Research Forum at Ohio State and later at two academic conferences; these laid the foundation for the present investigation. I also wish to thank Professor Yoshiko Matsumoto, who first introduced me to the field of pragmatics at Ohio State and provided me with an opportunity as a research assistant to transcribe spoken Japanese data. Although my experience with her as a student was brief, I continue to benefit from her teaching. Other professors whose assistance, advice, and support I also gratefully acknowledge are Professors Galal Walker, William Tyler, Mineharu Nakayama and Donald Brown of The Ohio State University, and Professors Suzuko Nishihara and Hiroko Nakagawa of the Kyoto Japanese Language School in Japan. I also wish to acknowledge the extensive financial support I have received from The Ohio State University in the form of a University Fellowship, several Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowships and a Presidential Fellowship. These have enabled me to focus almost exclusively on coursework and research while enrolled at this university. Through the generous financial assistance of the Japan-United States Educational Commission, I was able to spend 17 months in Japan collecting data and conducting related fieldwork. I would like to express my deepest thanks to Professor Keisuke Maruyama for his encouragement and thought-provoking discussions, as well as the kindness which he and his family extended to me and my husband throughout our stay in Japan. Without his assistance in the arrangements for data collection at numerous sites in Kansai and Kanto, this study would never have come to fruition.
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