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Varying orientations to sharing life stories: A diachronic study of Japanese women's discourse
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 June 2021
Abstract
Language change across the lifespan is relatively underexplored in sociolinguistics. While studies of individuals’ language across life stages are often considered to complement large scale studies of community-level language change, this study aims to explore how changes to family environment and social mobility interact with individual speakers’ stylistic practice across life stages. It examines ethnographic interviews of five women, originally from the same area in western Japan, the same high school, and similar socio-economic background, conducted by a single researcher eleven years apart. The chronological and inter-participant comparisons reveal a complex pattern of stylistic practice and stance taking as the women share stories about career, family and relationships with the researcher. The study also discusses audience design in language variation and explores how the participants utilise their discursive repertoires in their interaction with the researcher, whose background is significantly divergent from theirs. (Language across the lifespan, stylistic practice, Japanese)*
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press
Footnotes
*
This project has been funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project Grant (DP170102598). We would like to thank the participants in the research for their collaboration. We would like to thank Penelope Eckert and James Walker for discussions with them at the ‘30 Years of Talk’ Workshop Program (July 2019) which greatly aided the article. We are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. We would like to thank the following research assistants: Masataka Ogawa (statistics, especially the analysis presented in Tables 9 and 10), Hywel Stoakes (statistics), and Ben Morgan (editorial assistance). All errors and shortcomings are our own.
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