Linguistic Creativity in Japanese Discourse: Exploring the multiplicity of self, perspective, and voice

Pragmatics & Beyond New Series #159

by Senko K. Maynard

Using theoretical concepts of self, perspective, and voice as an interpretive guide, and based on the Place of Negotiation theory, this volume explores the phenomenon of linguistic creativity in Japanese discourse, i.e., the use of language in specific ways for foregrounding personalized expressive meanings. Personalized expressive meanings include psychological, emotive, interpersonal, and rhetorical aspects of communication, encompassing broad meanings such as feelings of intimacy or distance, emotion, empathy, humor, playfulness, persona, sense of self, identity, rhetorical effects, and so on. Nine analysis chapters explore the meanings, functions, and effects observable in the indices of linguistic creativity, focusing on discourse creativity (style mixture, borrowing others' styles, genre mixture), rhetorical creativity (puns, metaphors, metaphors in multimodal discourse), and grammatical creativity (negatives, demonstratives, first-person references). Based on the analysis of verbal and visual data drawn from multiple genres of contemporary cultural discourse, this work reveals that by creatively expressing in language we share our worlds from multiple perspectives, we speak in self's and others' many voices, and we endlessly create personalized expressive meanings as testimony to our own sense of being.

356 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Senko K. Maynard is professor of Japanese language and linguistics at Rutgers University. She received her bachelor's degree from Tokyo University of Foreign Studies and her doctorate in linguistics from Northwestern University. She has published extensively in the field of Japanese linguistics, especially in the area of discourse analysis and conversation analysis. Among her books are Japanese Conversation: Self-contextualization through Structure and International Management (1989), An Introduction to Japanese Grammar and Communication Strategies (1990), and Discourse Modality: Subjectivity, Emotion and Voice in the Japanese Language (1993). Author of numerous articles in Japanese, U.S., and international scholarly journals, Professor Maynard is the founding and current editor of Japanese Discourse: An International Journal for the Study of Japanese Text and Talk.