LINGUIST List 22.2875 Wed Jul 13 2011 Review: Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics: Hasegawa (2010) Editor for this issue: Monica Macaulay <monicalinguistlist.org> This LINGUIST List issue is a review of a book published by one of our supporting publishers, commissioned by our book review editorial staff. We welcome discussion of this book review on the list, and particularly invite the author(s) or editor(s) of this book to join in. If you are interested in reviewing a book for LINGUIST, look for the most recent posting with the subject "Reviews: AVAILABLE FOR REVIEW", and follow the instructions at the top of the message. You can also contact the book review staff directly. Directory         1.     Peter Backhaus , Soliloquy in Japanese and English Message 1: Soliloquy in Japanese and English Date: 13-Jul-2011 From: Peter Backhaus <backhauphotmail.com> Subject: Soliloquy in Japanese and English E-mail this message to a friend Discuss this message Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/21/21-5084.html AUTHOR: Yoko Hasegawa TITLE: Soliloquy in Japanese and English SERIES TITLE: Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 202 PUBLISHER: John Benjamins YEAR: 2010 Peter Backhaus, Waseda University, Tokyo SUMMARY What does language look like when all interactional elements are removed? This is the guiding question through Hasegawa's book ''Soliloquy in Japanese and English''. In other words, what linguistic characteristics can be observed when people talk to themselves rather than to each other? This problem is scrutinized focusing on Japanese (chapters 1-5) and, in part, English (chapter 6). In her introduction (pp. 1-39), Hasegawa first reviews various definitions and theoretical concepts of soliloquy and related terms. In the most simple terms, soliloquy can be described as ''the utterance of one's thoughts without addressing another individual'' (p. 2). Next the author gives an overview of previous studies dealing (in part) with soliloquy in Japanese speech, before outlining her own data, which constitute the empirical basis informing her book. In an experimental design, she audio-recorded soliloquies from 10 to 15 minutes in length of 24 native speakers of Japanese and 10 native speakers of English. Chapter 2 (pp. 41-71) takes a closer look at the occurrence of sentence-final particles in Hasegawa's Japanese soliloquy data, with special focus on ''ne'' and ''yo''. A quantitative analysis reveals that no less than 48.8% of all utterances end on a sentence-final particle, a ratio that Hasegawa hypothesizes to be about as high as in ordinary, i.e., interactional discourse. Unlike the latter, however, the soliloquy data show a conspicuous absence of ''yo'', which was used only five times (0.1% of utterances) in total. On the other hand, ''ne'' occurred in over 10% of the utterances. Using a model by Takubo and Kinsui (1997), Hasegawa interprets this discrepancy by the different functions the two particles fulfill in soliloquy. While ''ne'' is used for matching internal thought processes, ''yo'''s main task is to mark an inference, which is not commonly done when speaker and hearer come in one person. Chapter 3 (pp. 73-103) is about deixis and anaphora in the Japanese data. The major part of the chapter discusses the functioning of the ''ko'' (proximal)/''so'' (medial)/''a'' (distal) demonstratives. Hasegawa's main finding from her data is that, in contrast to common claims, ''ko'' and ''a'' in soliloquy function deictically, whereas ''so'' is exclusively used anaphorically. One most interesting hypothesis Hasegawa extracts from her analysis is that ''the very distinction between deictic and anaphoric uses of pronouns may well be a communicative phenomenon [...] irrelevant in soliloquy, where no communication with other individuals is intended'' (p. 205). The topic of chapter 4 (pp. 105-137) is gendered speech. Examining separately the speech of her male and female Japanese informants, Hasegawa finds that the female soliloquies contain relatively few commonly mentioned female-style expressions such as sentence-final ''wa'', ''kashira'', or NP+''yo''. Instead, her female speakers' soliloquies abound with expressions that have traditionally been considered male style (''na'', ''ka'', ''dayo'', etc.). Hasegawa's conclusion is that ''for contemporary women, these [...] expressions are neutral, not gendered forms at all'' (p. 120). The opposite case of male speakers employing female linguistic tokens does not occur in her data. This testifies to an often lamented asymmetry of linguistic resources (e.g. Nakamura 2007), in which male forms can be used by both male and female speakers, but female forms, if used at all, are strictly reserved for female speakers. The later part of the chapter deals with the topic of indexicality and how Japanese women's language, far from being a fixed sociolinguistic variable, in recent years has increasingly been construed as a strategic device for ''doing gender.'' In contrast to these studies, Hasegawa finds that, at least as far as her soliloquy data are concerned, women's language can be considered a relatively straightforward index of the speaker's gender (and, for that matter, sex). In chapter 5 (pp. 139-163), ''Soliloquy and linguistic politeness,'' Hasegawa moves away from her own speech data to take a closer look at the occurrence of soliloquy passages within ordinary interactions. Drawing from a large amount of examples from previous studies, Hasegawa demonstrates how brief soliloquy injections in conversations serve a vital function in bridging a gap between the desire to express intimacy while at the same time maintaining deference. Accordingly, the temporary shifts from formal style (in dialogue) to plain style (in soliloquy) and back again, according to Hasegawa, should best be understood as discourse mode shifts rather than mere speech style shifts. Chapter 6 (pp. 165-193) is titled ''The indefinite ''you'' in English soliloquy,'' but actually falls into two, loosely interrelated parts. The first part examines Hasegawa's English soliloquy data with special regard to the occurrence of the second person pronoun and how the informants in their speech use it indefinitely rather than deictically. This leads over to the second part of the chapter, which examines how soliloquy may help shed light on the age-old question whether thought exists as language-independent ''mentalese'' or whether all thought is necessarily processed through some form of inner speech. Giving examples from both English and Japanese soliloquy data, Hasegawa contends that the idea of thought as inner speech is but ''a metaphor, albeit a deep-seated one, not describing reality'' (p. 193). This is not to be taken as a proof for the existence of mentalese though, but merely shows that thought is not necessarily done in a dialogic format. EVALUATION What does language look like when all interactional elements are removed? At first look, it may seem absurd to make this the main question of a book in a series called Pragmatics & Beyond. What, if anything, one may wonder, can be learned from this antisocial, explicitly non-interactional type of speech that soliloquy happens to be? Quite a lot, as anyone who has read Hasegawa's book will surely agree. The strength of her argument is that she considers the topic of soliloquy not in isolation, but uses her analysis to gain some fresh insight into ordinary discourse as well, as becomes most obvious in the two chapters on gendered speech and politeness, respectively. This makes the book much more than merely a profound analysis of a larger speech corpus of people talking to themselves. Other strong points of the book are its sound and self-conscious methodology, as discussed on various occasions throughout the book; the application of both qualitative and quantitative types of analyses; and a critical reading of the findings against the backdrop of previous research (though I missed Jones and Ono (2010) in the discussion on style shift). One of the most interesting claims the book makes right at the beginning is that, with respect to the two languages examined, ''the soliloquy mode of discourse has been grammaticized to some extent in Japanese, but less so in English'' (p. 3). However, while this idea agrees with this reviewer's (non-native) intuitions, Hasegawa fails to empirically prove her claim. This is in part a problem of the experimental design of her survey and the soliloquy-only data it provides (though, to be fair, it would have been close to impossible to collect a larger set of soliloquy data within ordinary, dialogic, interaction). Another problem, which could have been more easily solved, is the strong bias in the analysis of the Japanese data (4 full chapters) and the English data (half a chapter). The book might have gained in focus if it had dealt only with the Japanese data and reserved the English soliloquies for future research projects. All in all, however, Hasegawa's book is a fascinating read that is highly recommendable to anyone interested in the pragmatic, sociolinguistic, and cognitive functioning of soliloquy, in Japanese and in general. REFERENCES Jones, Kimberly and Ono, Tsuyoshi (2010). ''Style Shifting in Japanese''. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins. Nakamura, Momoko (2007). Sei to nihongo [Gender and Japanese]. Tokyo: NHK. Takubo, Yukinori and Kinsui, Satoshi (1997). Discourse management in terms of mental spaces. Journal of Pragmatics 28: 741-758. ABOUT THE REVIEWER Peter Backhaus is Associate Professor at Waseda University, Tokyo. His research interests include sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, and writing and orthography. His most recent book is 'Communication in Elderly Care', an edited volume to appear August 2011 (Continuum). Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue Page Updated: 13-Jul-2011       About LINGUIST    |   Contact Us       While the LINGUIST List makes every effort to ensure the linguistic relevance of sites listed on its pages, it cannot vouch for their contents.