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Part of
Bonding through Context: Language and interactional alignment in Japanese situated discourse
Edited by Risako Ide and Kaori Hata
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 314] 2020
► pp. 61–82

Chapter 3
The discursive construction of husband and wife bonding

Analyzing benefactives in childrearing narratives

| University of Tsukuba
| Japan Women's University

In this chapter, we analyze Japanese women’s narratives about their child-rearing experiences to reveal the meta-level of positioning of their husbands’ involvement through examining the use and non-use of benefactive verb forms. We pose the grammatical form of benefactive, especially the -te kureru form, as a center of meaning making wherein the ideologies of husband and wife bonding are negotiated and enacted in the situated context of interviews. Analyzing the narratives of women in three different groups (i.e., housewives, dual-income working women, and farmer women) in Japan, we demonstrate how the use and the non-use of -te kureru benefactive differently indexes husband and wife bonding in childrearing, while reflecting and reproducing contrasting ideologies regarding gender relations within the family.

Keywords: interview narratives, benefactives, -te kureru , -te morau , gender ideology, indexicality
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical backgrounds
    • 2.1Grammatical usage of benefit expressions
    • 2.2The ideological usage of -te kureru
    • 2.3The changing Japanese family and gender norms
  • 3.Data and results
  • 4.Analysis: Husband and wife bonding in childrearing narratives
    • 4.1The use of -te kureru among the housewife group
    • 4.2The non-usage of -te kureru and use of -te morau among the dual-income group
    • 4.3The non-usage of -te kureru among the farmer group
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 3 December 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.314.03ide
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