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Part of
Linguistic Approaches to Emotions in Context
Edited by Fabienne H. Baider and Georgeta Cislaru
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 241] 2014
► pp. 251–276

Cross-cultural perception of some Japanese politeness and impoliteness expressions*

 | LIMSI-CNRS, France
 | Showa University, Kawasaki City, Japan
 | Laboratório de Fonética Acústica, FL | UFRJ | CNPq, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
 | CLLE-ERSSàB UMR5263 CNRS, France
Prosodic strategies may express polite or impolite speech acts. Five such strategies in Japanese are studied in a cross-cultural experiment. The attitudes are presented to subjects in different modalities: audio-only, video-only, audio-video and also described in Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) scripts. NSM scripts allow creating comparable translations of a given description, proposed in four languages: Japanese, American English, Brazilian Portuguese and French. Native subjects of these languages took a pair comparison test, as a way to measure the perceived proximity of presented stimuli. A multidimensional statistical analysis of the results allows a description of the main expressive dimensions perceived by subjects. The test shows the similarity of the perceptive patterns obtained via NSM scripts and visual and audio modalities. It also shows that subjects of different cultural origins shared about 60% of the global representation of these expressions, that 8% are unique to modalities, while 3% are unique to language background.
Published online: 13 March 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.241.15ril
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Cited by (6)

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Shochi, Takaaki, Albert Rilliard & Donna Erickson
2023. Chapter 8. Perceptual changes between adults and children for multimodal im/politeness in Japanese. In Multimodal Im/politeness [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 333], ► pp. 213 ff. DOI logo
Idemaru, Kaori, Bodo Winter, Lucien Brown & Grace Eunhae Oh
2020. Loudness Trumps Pitch in Politeness Judgments: Evidence from Korean Deferential Speech. Language and Speech 63:1 ► pp. 123 ff. DOI logo
Li, Aijun
2015. Introduction. In Encoding and Decoding of Emotional Speech [Prosody, Phonology and Phonetics, ], ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Li, Aijun
2015. Perception of Multimodal Emotional Expressions By Japanese and Chinese. In Encoding and Decoding of Emotional Speech [Prosody, Phonology and Phonetics, ], ► pp. 33 ff. DOI logo
Nishida, Toyoaki, Masakazu Abe, Takashi Ookaki, Divesh Lala, Sutasinee Thovuttikul, Hengjie Song, Yasser Mohammad, Christian Nitschke, Yoshimasa Ohmoto, Atsushi Nakazawa, Takaaki Shochi, Jean-Luc Rouas, Aurelie Bugeau, Fabien Lotte, Ming Zuheng, Geoffrey Letournel, Marine Guerry & Dominique Fourer
2015. Synthetic Evidential Study as Augmented Collective Thought Process – Preliminary Report. In Intelligent Information and Database Systems [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 9011], ► pp. 13 ff. DOI logo
Kotsifas, Dimitrios
2014. Prosody and emotion in Greek: Evidence from spontaneous-speech corpora analysis. In Linguistic Approaches to Emotions in Context [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 241], ► pp. 231 ff. DOI logo

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