Mothers' Use of Terms Referring to Their Child in Japanese Conversations: A Conversation Analytic Perspective

This study examines ways mothers refer to her child in conversations in Japanese from a conversation analytic perspective. Conversation analysis is a methodology to examine real time interactions from the perspective of the participants themselves (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson, 1974). Person reference has been among the major topics of conversation analysis since the seminal work by Sacks and Schegloff (1979). Studies have shown that forms of reference can do a special interactional work other than referring to (a) person(s) (Schegloff, 1997; Stivers, 2007). For instance, Oh (2010) shows that Korean speakers use a quasi-pronoun based on the distal demonstrative ce (‘that over there’) in referring to a co-present third person in order to distance themselves from the referent. In this study, I focus on the kind of interactional work mothers are doing when they use different expressions to refer to their child in conversations. My data were collected at two Kosodate Hiroba in Osaka, Japan. Kosodate Hiroba is a place where mothers of a very young child spend time watching their child and enjoy conversations with other mothers and staff members, often sharing their problems in child-raising and getting advice from them. I found that the unmarked form of a mother’s reference to her child is either the child’s name or kono ko (‘this child’), neither of which does anything more than refer to the child. By contrast, the mother’s use of kono hito (‘this person’) to refer to her child can do a special interactional work. For instance, mothers recurrently make reference to their child with kono hito when they complain about the child. I argue that the expression kono hito makes a complaint more easily recognizable because the word hito (‘person’) conveys that the referent has independent thought and is difficult to control even for her/his mother.