Japanese and American meetings and what goes on before them

Abstract

Some genuinely j l luminating work on interethnic and intercultural communication, and the resulting misunderstandings which often occur, has been carried out by researchers in the fields of sociolinguistics and the ethnography of communication (for example. Basso 1970: Gumperz 1982: Scollon and Scollon 1981). Their empirically grounded methodology has contributed solid insights about where the locus of misunderstanding in interethnic encounters may be tbund. These scholars have specified various distinct categories of communicative behavior which are potentially problematic. Some of these troublesome domains are the discourse structure of the language, cultural assumptions about appropriate behavior and the 'presentation of self, and norms concerning the drstribution of talk and the exchange of speaking turns. These various ways of speaking and constructing talk may produce or contribute to two fundamental types of misunderstanding: pragmatic misunderstandings and structural misunderstandings. Structural misunderstandings are located in features of language such as its lexicon and grammar, and are often consciously recognized. For example, every issue of the Japanese pop culture and language learning magazine Mangajin contains a Bloopers column in which readers relate some dramatic l inguistic mistake. A recent issue had the following entry by an American man living in Japan:2