Culture-specific patterns of communication play a pivotal role in individuals’ understanding of how to interact with those around them. It is well known that the Japanese communication style is intuitive and indirect, and that interpersonal communication often relies on intuition, empathy, and feeling. This lecture focuses on narrative discourse, a linguistic meeting ground of culture, cognition, and emotions, specifically examining various issues such as genre, topic, and oral vs. written narratives. The lecture demonstrates the importance of paying attention not only to narrative content/structure but also to the appropriate use of linguistic devices. Accordingly, the overall goal of this lecture is to grasp culture- and language-specific ways of expressing affective elements in narrative discourse.

Masahiko Minami is Professor at San Francisco State University. He also served as an Invited Professor at the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (2012–2016), where he edited the Handbook of Japanese Applied Linguistics (De Gruyter Mouton, 2016). Dr. Minami received his doctorate from Harvard University. He is currently Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Japanese Linguistics.