Socio-cultural concepts in the Japanese language description and education
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| Year of publication | 2023 |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
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| Description | Specifics of Japan’s social environment have often been described with various culturally bound concepts, such as uchi vs. soto, ura vs. omote, honne vs. tatemae etc. It is also often claimed that these concepts manifest in the structure and usage of the Japanese language. However, the language itself tends to be described rather with general linguistic categories (not rarely based on the structure of Indo-European languages, especially English). In the present discussion I will suggest that some of the general cultural concepts can serve well to describe the structure and usage of modern Japanese and can be even used in teaching it to non-native speakers. I will demonstrate the notion on examples of grammatical constructions, lexical categories, and some socio-pragmatic cases. All the participants of the discussion are more than welcome to contribute with their own ideas and experience. |