A Cross-linguistic Study of Negotiating Interaction: A Comparison of Story Co-construction by Korean, Japanese, and American Pairs

Abstract

In the present study, we explore how the speakers of the three languages propose their ideas and co-construct stories as they attempt to organize a set of fifteen pictures into a coherent story. We examined data from 12 pairs each of Japanese and English speakers, and 10 pairs of Korean speakers. This task-based conversation requires a constant negotiation between the speakers involved, where ideas are proposed and (dis)agreed with. In particular, we examined four main linguistic means the speakers used when proposing their ideas: (a) declarative statements, (b) declarative statements with mitigating expressions such as "seem like" or "maybe", (c) declarative interrogatives, (d) interrogatives including yes/no (negative) questions and tag questions. The results show that the American speakers tend to use declarative statements with or without mitigating expressions, whereas Korean and Japanese speakers tend to utilize interrogative forms. This suggests that the way the American pairs negotiate agreement is straightforward, information- centered, and speaker-oriented while the way the Korean and Japanese pairs negotiate is indirect/subtle, interaction-based, and hearer-oriented. The second type of interactive behavior we examined in this study is how speakers co-construct their story. Co-construction of a syntactic unit is an important means of displaying collaborative efforts between conversationalists. We examined four different categories of co-construction in this study: (a) co-construction of one proposition (phrasal or mono-clausal units), (b) co-construction of a story line by relaying (two-part multi-clausal units), (c) repetition, and (d) overlapping repetition. The results show that the Korean and Japanese speakers used all of the four categories much more frequently than the English speakers. This result also seems to point to the same conclusion, namely that the Korean and Japanese language speakers are more interdependent and mind-sharing, thus placing themselves in an unseparable field. The wide divergences shown between English and the two Asian languages seem to suggest that the existing basic assumptions about human interaction, where two independent rational conversationalists share the goal of the exchange of information, should be revised according to a wider perspective based on the underlying cultural practices of the language users. This paper will show that theoretically unbiased and culturally enriched views on language interaction can properly describe the diversity found cross-linguistically.