How do close friends talk? : A report on findings from the analysis of the Japanese young people's friendly conversational interactions
Abstract
The study concerns various linguistic practices and discourse strategies Japanese young people routinely employ in face-to-face and text-based computer-mediated conversational interactions with their peers for performing and negotiating their identities as those of close friends. The studied patterns thus include not only those, which might be regarded as intrinsically signalising alignment and involvement, but also such behaviour as teasing, cursing, or quarrelling.
The subject matter looked into by the present paper forms a part of the author's larger scale research, which investigates the linguistic practices and discourse strategies used by the Japanese native speakers falling into different contextually defined age categories in their friendly conversational interactions in order to establish, maintain, or manifest such feelings as closeness, unity, solidarity, and intimacy. The research project is theoretically informed primarily by interactional sociolinguistics and (computer-mediated) discourse analysis.
The data consist of audio recordings of spontaneous face-to-face conversational interactions of Japanese young people who define themselves as close friends and samples from their text-based computer-mediated conversational interaction threads on social networking sites, further supplemented by follow-up interviews with the speakers.