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[fw]

Hello everyone.

The following is the last part of an article titled �Saying the Same Thing in Different Ways,� which is an English reading material for Japanese high school students, adapted from John Hinds� book �Situation vs. Person focus.�

My question is about the appropriateness of the choice of the phrase �the speaker� by the adapter. I wonder if �the speaker� here does not necessarily good for the context. I�d appreciate your comment.

Some people claim that Japanese speakers focus on situations while English speakers focus on people when they speak. For example, when you report that you have a car, the most common way of doing this in English is to say, �I have a car.� In Japanese, although it is possible to say, �Watashi wa kuruma o motte imasu,� it is much more common to say, �Kuruma ga arimasu.� The English speaker requires that a person be mentioned while in Japanese it is preferred that a person not be mentioned.

Here is a similar example. In English, a wife tells her husband, �My mother called today.� Here the subject of the sentence is �my mother.� If a Japanese wife wants to convey the same message to her husband, she is most likely to say, �Kyo (haha kara) denwa ga atta no yo.� I have placed �haha kara� within parentheses to show that this information does not necessarily have to be specified. But even if it is specified, the noun �haha� is not the subject of the sentence.

To sum up what I have discussed above, the English speaker and the Japanese speaker will often select different ways to describe the same situation. The English speaker will usually focus on the speaker and describe the situation with lots of specific details, which the Japanese speaker may consider unnecessary.

Best regards,
Fw

[MrPedantic]

Hello Fw

It does sound a little odd. I wonder whether it's a mistake for "the person".

Bye
MrP

[fw]

Thanks, Mrpedantic, for your reply. For your convenience, the original version of the passage by J. Hinds is as follows.

Monane and Rogers 1977 have introduced a distinction between situation focus and person focus. They claim that Japanese speakers focus on situations whereas English speakers focus on people when they speak. One of the examples they give is how to report that you have a car. In English, the most common way of doing this is to say, �I have a car.� In Japanese, although it is possible to say,「わたしはくるまをもっています」, it is much more common to say,「くるまがあります」. The English speaker requires that a person be mentioned while in Japanese it is preferred that a person not be mentioned.
　　In Hinds 1986, I reported a systematic difference in the way an English speaker and a Japanese speaker report the same event. If a child causes the milk in a glass to leave that glass and spread all over the table, the English speaker will say, "Oh no, she spilled the milk.� The Japanese speaker, on the other hand will say「あら，ミルクがこぼれた」. It is possible, but not likely, that the English speaker will say, �Oh no the milk spilled.� It is equally unlikely that the Japanese speaker will say,「あら，この子ミルクをこぼした」. The English speaker likes to put a person into the subject position while the Japanese speaker tries to avoid this.
　　There are other similar examples. In English, a wife tells her husband, �My mother called today.� Here the subject of the sentence is my mother. If a Japanese wife wants to convey the same message to her husband, she is most likely to say,「きょう〔母から〕電話があったのよ」. I have placed 母から within brackets to indicate that even this information does not necessarily have to be specified. But even if it is specified, the noun 母 is not the subject of the sentence.
　　In fact, there are other more extreme cases in which names are not used in telephone calls in Japanese. Not only do people refer to themselves as こちら in Japanese and their conversational partners as そちら, something that is never done in English, they also use place names whenever possible rather than people�s names. Thus it is quite common for someone to say,「このあいだ宝塚から電話があったよ」. In English, it is necessary to say �The other day my mother called� and not �The other day there was a telephone call from Takarazuka."*
　　In English we ask, �Has Mr Brown answered your letter yet?� In Japanese the appropriate expression is,「返事はもうきましたか？」. In this case as well, English speakers put a person into the subject position of the sentence while Japanese speakers tend to avoid even mentioning a specific person.
　　Another example of this same tendency to underspecify information in Japanese is discussed by 奥津 1975. The title of his article is「ぼくはウナギだというけれど」. Even though this sentence has a person in it, it is unclear just what it means out of context. In an appropriate context, such as when several people are ordering food in a restaurant, this kind of utterance is quite common and understandable.
　　寺村 1976 also discusses the difference between how English speakers and how Japanese speakers phrase things. He points out a conversation that he had with an American friend. They were walking along a street in an area that he had not been in for a long while. He said,「このあたりもずいぶんかわりましたねえ」. His friend, who was quite fluent in Japanese,「ええ，ああいうマンションが最近きゅうにたくさんたてられましたからねえ」. Teramura points out that a native speaker of Japanese would have said たちました instead of たてられました. We can understand that this is another case in which the English speaker wants to specify that a person is involved in the construction of buildings, even if she is aware of Japanese usage. That is, she knew that Japanese do not always specify people in their statements, and so she left it out. But she chose a verb form which clearly states that the apartment buildings were built by someone. The Japanese speaker, in the same situation, would have selected a verb such as たちました which does not imply the mention of a person at all.
　　The point of this chapter has been to show that Japanese speakers and English speakers will often select different ways to describe the same situation. When different ways are selected, the Japanese speaker will almost always be the one to select an expression which contains less information.
fw

[MrPedantic]

Hello FW

Yes, it looks like a mistake for "person"!

Bye
MrP