Informality in Japanese

Informality is essential in human interaction as it fulfills the basic communicative need to connect with others. When and how do speakers of Japanese construct informality within so-called “formal” contexts and why do they do so? By going beyond the previous studies on speech style in Japanese, this volume attempts to answer these questions. It examines multiple linguistic forms including the vernacular su style, regional dialect, and multimodal and multilevel resources for discursive construction of informality. In ten chapters of the book, leading specialists and up-and-coming scholars analyze a range of data sources including research interviews, a business manner training camp, TV news shows, a business telephone call, TV Olympic broadcasting, and social media. The book will certainly be of interest to scholars of pragmatics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, Japanese linguistics and Japanese language. The findings of this volume raise new questions to be explored in future research.