English vs. Japanese condolences: What people say and why

Abstract

This paper uses the ethnopragmatics approach to discover the sociopragmatic knowledge that influences what English and Japanese speakers say when condoling bereaved people who have recently lost someone close to them. Linguistic data are drawn from: previous studies on English and Japanese condolences; discourse completion tasks; movies; and the authors’ native-speaker intuitions. Analyses from the literature on condolences contribute to the discussion. We present cultural scripts—one for English and one for Japanese—as hypotheses to account for the observed verbal and nonverbal behavior of English and Japanese speakers when offering condolences. We propose that the social closeness between the deceased and the bereaved affects what all condolers say, but that this effect is different for English and Japanese speakers. Another key difference is that the perceived role of the condoler is different between the two langua-cultures; Japanese speakers sense a greater responsibility to share in the mourning process.