Advice Giving in Japanese Conversations

Abstract

This dissertation examined advice giving as it occurred in two-party Japanese interactions between friends and between college teachers and students, using conversation analysis (CA) as a method. Based on a data corpus of approximately 23.6 hours of friend-friend conversations and seven hours of teacher-student conversations, the analysis focused on the sequential environments of advice as well as advice utterance formulations and their sequential positioning. While some canonical advice forms are treated as interchangeable or compared in terms of associated “strength” in speech acts, the findings showed that interactants differentiated among different forms based on where in the sequence advice occurred or what the advice that was expressed with each form did in the given sequential context (e.g., warning, confirming the preferredness of a future action, or providing a solution or new perspective). The interactional environments of advice in two different data sets suggested that participants oriented to the action of advice as sensitive concerning normativity and knowledge asymmetry, the two dimensions of advice identified in the previous research. In the teacher-student conversations, however, the teachers often gave advice when there was no immediate trouble or actively established grounds for advice, thereby displaying orientation to their social roles as educators and adults with more life experience. The study offers insights into how advice giving is understood in Japanese talk-in-interaction and how interaction and grammar can inform each other.