Story Co-construction and Establishment of Mutual Consent: Convergences and Divergences Between English, Japanese and Korean

Abstract

The present paper aims to show similarities and differences in the establishment of mutual consent in problem-solving tasks engaged in by English, Japanese, and Korean speakers, and to suggest that the results cannot be explained by existing frameworks based on western cultures and philosophical assumptions but rather can be better accounted for by considering the deep-rooted cultural practices of each language users. The data `Mr. O Corpus` is a cross-linguistic video corpus consisting of three types of interactions-conversations, narratives, and problem-solving tasks-in American English, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. This study examined the corpus based on the problem-solving tasks, where two people worked together to construct a coherent story by arranging fifteen picture cards. The subjects were all female speakers, with half of them being university students and the other half teachers. All of the processes and interactions were videotaped. In total, we examined the data from 22 English, 22 Japanese, and 20 Korean pairs. We examined all the verbal behaviors in the data, and classified them into three categories: i) the storyline, ii) the descriptions and comments about the cards, and iii) the ordering of the cards. The results show that the American English speakers used 82.6% of their total turns for the three types of talk whereas only 73.7% of all turns by the Japanese pairs and 77.2% by Korean pairs belong to the three types of talk. This suggests that English pairs have a greater tendency to explicitly verbalize the process of the task than the Japanese pairs, and that the Korean pairs fall in the middle. Further results of qualitative analyses of the data show that the Japanese and Korean interactions share more similarities than differences, but that there are qualitative differences between English and Japanese/Korean interactions. That is, the verbalization of the English speakers tends to be very straightforward, propositionally-oriented or task-oriented. On the other hand, the verbalization of Japanese and Korean speakers tends to be interactionally-oriented. First of all, heavily dependent on the shared visual information, both Japanese and Korean language pairs frequently use deictic expressions and gestures, such as pointing and gazes, without explicit verbalization. Second, in both languages each pair depend on each other to complete the task, profusely using backchannels of agreement, completing each other`s turn, overlapping and repeating the partner`s turn. Third, both language participants rarely make assertive statements but use a variety of modality expressions, negative or tag questions insuring mutual agreement. This paper will show that theoretically-unbiased and culturally enriched views on language interaction can describe properly the diversity found cross-linguistically.