Conflict and the local accomplishment of Japanese social interaction: The case of arguments in Japanese university faculty meetings
Conflict in Japanese social interaction, and Japanese society in general, has primarily been treated as a disruptive phenomenon which needs to be balanced against perceptions of Japan as a hierarchically organized society that places a high value on the appearance of interpersonal harmony. However, without necessarily denying the importance of hierarchy and harmony in Japanese society, I use an analysis of arguing in Japanese university faculty meetings to suggest that conflict in Japanese social interaction can be approached as a phenomenon in its own right. I demonstrate that instead of explaining the occurrence, or lack thereof, of arguments in terms of the ranks of the meetingsf participants or their desire to preserve harmony, it is possible to describe arguments as they arise from the glocalh procedures used in the meetings to exchange speech. Focusing the analysis on a comparison of two different sets of faculty meetings, I show that the gspeech exchange systemh used in one set of meetings discourages the onset of arguments while that used in the other actually encourages the participants to initiate opposition and subsequently pursue that opposition into arguments.
Lexical Matters
The lexicon contains rich information about how we perceive the world, and recent researches of the area have made rather surprising discoveries. In this talk, I will show several examples of cross linguistic lexical alternations and discuss what we can say about our cognition and concept formation.