Differences in Direction Indicating Expressions Between Japanese and German

A Contrastive Analysis of Newspaper Articles on Traffic Accidents

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-376-4_69How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Directional expression; frames of reference; objective construal; subjective construal

ABSTRACT

It is said that each language has its preferred expressions. Japanese tends to depict an event from within the situation where it occurs experientially and subjectively, while English tends to express an event from outside the situation where it occurs objectively. This difference in the way languages grasp the situation is referred to as “subjective construal” and “objective construal.” In general, directions are presented in two different ways: subjective and objective representations. This study aimed to analyze how directions are expressed in functionally corresponding traffic accident newspaper articles in Japanese and German in terms of frames of reference based on Levinson (2008). For this purpose, two traffic accident articles from recent local newspaper articles in Japan and Germany, each containing directional expressions, were selected and analyzed concerning directional expressions. The results showed that Japanese people express direction in a “relative” framework by focusing on the person or vehicle involved such as “a boy was hit by a passenger car coming from the left,” whereas German people attempt to position direction objectively by using city names and the directions such as East, West, North, South like “a witness observed a 29-year-old woman crossed from crossed Uerdinger Straße at Bockumer Platz in a northerly direction.” Thus, Japanese people express direction subjectively, i.e., in a “relative” framework, while German people express direction objectively in terms of cardinal points, i.e., in an “absolute” framework. These are clear examples of expressions that correspond respectively to subjective and objective construal (the choice between alternative expressions) in cognitive linguistics and confirm that Japanese direction instructions are expressed subjectively.

Copyright

© 2024 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Yoshinori Nishijima
PY  - 2024
DA  - 2024/02/26
TI  - Differences in Direction Indicating Expressions Between Japanese and German
BT  - Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Language, Literature, Culture, and Education (ICOLLITE 2023)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 514
EP  - 522
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-376-4_69
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-376-4_69
ID  - Nishijima2024
ER  -