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BYU Asian Studies Journal

Abstract

My research project deals with intercultural communication issues in religious conversations among American English speakers and Japanese speakers. Much research has been done to examine how miscommunications occur across cultures, and that understanding cultural contexts can help us be more successful in linguistic endeavors. This paper specifically examines how the different sociocultural meanings attached to individual lexical items associated with religious topics (e.g., ‘God’ and ‘prayer’) differ between English and Japanese. This is a qualitative study using data from publicly available corpora of Japanese and English, as well as sociolinguistic interviews. I will not present the analysis of the interviews here, however, I consulted the interviews to confirm the data from the corpora and will briefly mention those things. The data includes which collocations these two words appear with in certain grammatical structures in both English and Japanese, as well as what social contexts they appear in. There are some similarities across these two different linguistic and cultural contexts, however, noting the differences can help us know what cultural assumptions may underlie discussions about religion and how these impact the development of religious understandings. This matters because religious topics are highly sensitive to context—that is, to speakers' pre-existing assumptions about religion, their worldviews, and the beliefs they were raised up in. From there, we can better learn how to adapt in order to communicate and interact with others with more cultural awareness. I will address the potential miscommunications that might occur due to different understandings of ostensibly similar lexical meanings in the social context of Christian missionaries aiming to communicate with and seek Japanese converts. While there are several limitations to this study including limited participants in the interviews and the analysis of only two lexical items in the corpus study, this research still serves as a valuable starting point for further studies.

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