Comparing Japanese and American interaction, Language, Social Structure, and Culture argues that language use is instrumental in the construction of social structure and culture. In order to ground the work in empirical evidence, verbal interaction in similar situations – Japanese and American cooking classes – is compared. Unlike other studies of verbal interaction, a genre analysis approach is used to examine regular patterns at three levels of language use: interaction, discourse, and grammar. Collectively, these patterns exhibit both similarities and differences across the classes in the two cultures, creating the unique event that has been institutionalized as a cooking class in each culture. In concluding, the author suggests that genre analysis is a useful approach for cross-cultural research in that it provides information about situation-specific language use, but also information about what aspects of linguistic structure are likely to become conventionalized across languages and cultures, across situations, and across time.

Table of contents

Acknowledgments ix–x Transcription conventions xi Abbreviations in transcripts xiii Preliminaries: The relationship between genre, social structure and culture 1–16 A closer look at genre and related concepts 17–58 Regularities at the level of interaction: The structure of participation 59–108 Regularities at the level of discourse: The content of the talk 109–136 Regularities at the level of grammar: Clause structure and transitivity 137–186 Conclusion: A summary of the findings and some issues for further research 187–194 Notes 195–203 References 205–218 Index 219–223