Contrastive sociolinguistic study on language behavior and communicative competence in Japanese and German

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The primary concern of this study is to clarify correlations between language behavior and the communicative competence in German and Japanese. The purpose of this study is to consider from the viewpoint of the contrastive sociolinguistics of what German communicative competences consist. First of all, to pursue this purpose, the conceptual definition of communicative competence was discussed. This result was published in "Sociolinguistics, An International Handbook of the Science of Language and Society". Next, politeness was regarded as one of the communicative competence, and the objects of this study were clarified : realities of the language behavior, social norms, evaluating concepts as commonsense in everyday life, rules of language use, language norms, concepts of communicative virtues, a historical development of language use and a relation between language and ideology. In addition, it has been found that not only "politeness" ("Hoflichkeit"), but also other concepts play an important role in contemporary German society based on empirical investigation in this research : as positive evaluating concepts, these are "ehrlich", "freundlich", "tolerant", "hilfsbereit" etc ; as negative concepts, "arrogant", "unehrlich", intolerant", "egoistisch", "rucksichtslos" etc. Moreover, the development of the study on politeness in Europe and in Japan was theoretically compared and contrasted. It was confirmed that, while the researches in Europe dealt with relationship between politeness and ideology, this aspect was not sufficiently researched in Japan. As macro-sociolinguistic researches, I also discussed the status of German language in Japanese society and the relation between communicative competence and language policies.