This discourse-analytical study compares question-answer sequences in first conversations between unacquainted people in 15 English and 5 Japanese conversations. The English data were videotaped in the United States, Australia, and the UK. The Japanese data were collected in Japan. The total length of the data is about 10 hours. All participants are male. The participants were instructed to have 30 minutes first conversations with new acquaintances. Utterances which have question forms and question functions which elicit new information from the asker were extracted and analyzed. Taking into account that Japanese language has very different syntax to English, I compared Japanese and English question-answer patterns and examined the correlations between these syntactic-semantic categories of questions and the pragmatic types/functions of questions .
The results of the interviews with each participant reveal that English speakers and Japanese speakers have different perspectives on asking questions. English speakers believe that the goal of the conversation is to acquire new information and knowledge from other participants. They also want to show their competence and intelligence in first meetings. Japanese speakers are inclined to be more considerate toward other participants’ feelings. Several participants claimed that asking detailed questions, personal opinions and ideas is viewed as an impolite behavior.
The results of the data analysis show how their cultural norms were applied during the conversation. In the English data, participants are inclined to require information, opinions and ideas from other participants. They ask questions to contribute to the topic dvelopment and elaborate upon the current topic from the information giver. In the Japanese data, those types of questions occurred less frequently. They ask questions to provide an introduction to a new topic. Moreover, they select what to ask very sensibly in order to avoid being impolite. They tended to ask about simple facts and participants’ experiences when the question could be too offensive. They hesitated to ask personal opinions or beliefs especially when their responses were expected to create friction. Japanese participants used hedges which indicate that they knew it would be very rude to ask and apologized repeatedly when they really needed the information.
As for the answering part, English participants elaborated their answers. They responded to questions with disclosure and added more information. Thus the speaker and the listeners got involved with each other. On the other hand in Japanese conversations, information receivers appeared to just give the go-ahead sign with brief backchannelings. They seldom asked follow-up questions to elicit more information on the topic. The length of the answer tends to depend on the information giver since other participants avoided elaborating upon the current topic.
The results show how the question and answer patterns create different discourse styles which are attributed to their language and socio-cultural background. It is suggested that English native speakers’ aim in conversation may be “to gain a new knowledge from the other participants,” whereas Japanese speakers’ aim in conversation may simply be to be a good listener and participants will inherently appreciate nearly any information they are given.
