This presentation examines “vague” questions uttered by participants in Japanese medical discourse in order to clarify what causes this vagueness and how interpreters process it in their cognitive environment. Speakers of the Japanese language often utter syntactically incomplete, semantically ambiguous, and/or pragmatically vague questions, and this tendency can also be seen in some in medical discourse. This semantic ambiguity (e.g., between declarative and interrogative sentential mood) and pragmatic vagueness (e.g., between information-seeking questions and other types, like self-oriented or rhetorical) seems to be caused by: (a) Japanese syntactic features including subject omission and sentence-final particles, and (b) socio-linguistic aspects such as politeness and (in cases where the speakers of “vague” questions are patients) insufficient knowledge of medical terms.

My study focuses on the former: syntactic features. These can directly cause semantically ambiguous/pragmatically vague interpretations of utterances in several ways. First, because Japanese is basically a topic-prominent language, speakers often omit the subject. Second, Japanese has a variety of sentence-final particles (SFPs) that can lead interpreters to access certain speaker attitudes to propositional content (Goto, 2018). Some SFPs, however, can be used for more than one sentence type and/or combined into “compound SFPs,” which causes confusion. For instance, the compound SFP ka-ne (question marker ka + confirmation marker ne) can function as a speech act of questioning with a confirmatory intention. The interpreter must grasp the subtle differences among ka, ne, and ka-ne.

   My target interactions are extracts from conversations between speech therapists and clients recorded by my research collaborator, Prof. Toshiaki Katada, in medical institutions in Japan. My data analysis takes a relevance-theoretic approach (e.g., Sperber & Wilson, 1986/1995), in particular the notions of informative/communicative intentions, explicit/implicit meanings, and basic/higher-level explicatures, to clarify the process of understanding “vague” questions. I show that interpreters use various kinds of clues, including contextual information such as previous utterances, paralinguistic information such as facial expressions and tone of voice, and socio-linguistic information such as closeness or “intimacy” between participants.

 

References:

Goto, R. (2018). Rhetorical questions: A relevance-theoretic approach to interrogative utterances in English and Japanese. Tokyo: Hituzi shobo.

Sperber, D. & D. Wilson (1986/1995). Relevance: Communication and cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.