The Insertion of Person References Motivated by Pragmatic Differences in Estonian-English-Japanese Facebook Communication

Abstract

Sociopragmatic differences have been examined between many languages and cultures, including English and Japanese. However, Estonian and Japanese have yet to be compared, and thus this data of EstonianEnglish-Japanese communication on Facebook offers a look at a type of code-switching that is caused by the sociopragmatic differences between Estonian and Japanese – i.e. the insertion of person references from Japanese to Estonian and English utterances by native Estonians.

I am using the Estonian-English-Japanese Facebook communication dataset from Kilp (2021) with new added conversations. The data consist of synchronous private Facebook messages between 2015 and 2021: a total of 7 informants, 50 conversations and 14,681 tokens. A usage-based approach and a qualitative analysis are applied to the data from individual informants and particular cases.

These data show that a perception of pragmatic differences causes the insertions of the Japanese person references, senpai ‘senior’ and sensei ‘teacher’, in various forms (affixed to the name, replacing the name, elongated, capitalised, in the Latin alphabet, in Japanese script) in Estonian and English utterances, while factors such as vertical hierarchy, horizontal solidarity and (situational) salience play an important role in facilitating insertion.

Keywords: deixis, code-switching, vocative, usage-based approach, contact linguistics, computer-mediated communication, salience, Estonian, English, Japanese