Where the husbands stand
A comparative analysis of stance-taking in English and Japanese narratives about child rearing
In this paper, I analyse women’s interview narratives from the United States and Japan about their child rearing experiences to
examine how stance-taking towards their experiences and their family members manifest itself differently. Paying attention to the
narratives regarding their husbands’ role in child rearing, I examine how stance-taking may be perceived through overt and implied
references in the use of linguistic resources. With the American English data, I discuss how the shift of personal pronouns
combined with the discourse marker but create metaframes of the speakers’ stances, categorized as
“abstract/positive” and “concrete/negative.” In contrast, Japanese narratives revealed that women’s stance-taking towards their
husbands was marked through the concurrent usage of supportive giving verbs (-te kureru), indexing indebtedness
on the side of the women, as well as nominalization forms that categorized their partners as certain types of men based on shared
social expectations.
Article outline
- Introduction
- The study
- English narrative data and analysis
- Speaking in the plural and the shifting use of personal pronouns
- The discourse marker but and the creation of metaframes
- Japanese narrative data and analysis
- The use of supportive giving verbs
- Categorizing husbands through nominalization
- Discussion
- Conclusion
-
Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
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