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![From a! to zo: Japanese pragmatics and its
contribution to JSL/JFL pedagogy
Dina R. Yoshimi
Abstract
This chapter provides an overview of the literature on Japanese pragmatics
with the goal of a) highlighting the theoretical, and methodological factors
that have been central in shaping the current field of Japanese pragmatics,
and b) illustrating how research on pragmatics in Japanese language
pedagogy and curriculum development has come to be increasingly ordered
by an empirically-grounded understanding of those communicative
practices and interactional routines that organize the pragmatics of social
interaction in Japanese.
1. Introduction1
Although pragmatics may be the new kid on the block in the field of
Japanese foreign language (JFL) pedagogy, pragmatic phenomena are
hardly new to the JFL classroom.2
Years before pragmatics had even been
mentioned in conjunction with Japanese language pedagogy, the instruction
and explanation of the pragmatic aspects of Japanese were salient
components of JFL textbooks (e.g., Naganuma and Mori 1962; Jorden with
Chaplin 1963). Within the first ten chapters of Naganuma and Mori’s
(1962) introductory text, for example, there are discussions of polite
language use (use of prefix o-, of kudasai and [doozo]~~-te kudasai, and of
-san/sensei), resources for discourse cohesion (-te, ga), and variable
functions of sentence-final particle ne, to mention but a few of the
pragmatic aspects singled out for explanation. In sharp contrast to the
highly systematic presentation of the structural and lexical components of
the language that comprise the primary instructional focus of the grammar-
based “Main Texts,”3
the presentation of these points appears to be
opportunistic, and the explanations themselves are infused with an almost
commonsensical attitude toward usage. Thus, while complete and accurate
knowledge of lexis and grammar were clearly the primary goals of JFL](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25503714-250511121956-186e11cd/85/Pragmatic-Competence-Naoko-Taguchi-Editor-44-320.jpg)
![20 Dina R. Yoshimi
instruction in the 1960s and 1970s, the importance of the pragmatic aspects
of the language were not overlooked, although their communicative
functions may not have been fully understood by practitioners in the field
of JFL pedagogy.
Notably, a similar treatment of Japanese pragmatic resources is evident
in many of the foundational scholarly works in Japanese linguistics from
the 1960s and 1970s. Working within the various approaches to linguistic
description and analysis of that era, scholars addressed such aspects of
Japanese pragmatics as stance marking and speaker perspective (Akatsuka
1978; Kuroda 1973, 1979), honorific morphology and its role in the
production of polite language (Martin 1975), discourse organization
(Kindaichi 1957/1978), and Japanese deictic phenomena (Kuno 1973;
Smith 1979), among others. As was consistent with the standard linguistic
research methods of the time, anecdotal observations, or constructed
examples with “imagined contexts of usage” derived from native speaker
intuitions were, effectively, the sole source of data. These sentence-level
examples were thought to be analyzable through introspection (often with
the assistance of a native speaker informant), and the phenomenon
identified through the research was then accounted for through the
economical elegance of a linguistic generalization.
Notably, the researcher’s orientation to the pragmatic features of a given
linguistic resource often stemmed from the inability of a syntactically-
grounded analysis to fully account for the functions and/or distributions of
the given resource(s) in the data. It was through such problem-solving
processes that many of the concepts commonly used to explicate Japanese
pragmatic phenomena today were first introduced: “(Speaker) empathy”
(Kuroda 1979; Lebra 1976; Smith 1979) and “speaker point of view“
(Kuno 1979), indirectness (Ueda 1974), obligatory attention to hierarchical
social ordering in linguistic use (Nakane 1970; Martin 1975), etc. A range
of pragmatic phenomena also caught the interest of researchers in the social
sciences, who discussed a number of social aspects of Japanese pragmatics:
The orientation to social hierarchy in everyday interaction (Nakane 1970),
the role of empathy (omoiyari) in listener response behaviors (Lebra 1976:
39) and the pervasiveness of obligation and reciprocal dependence in
Japanese interaction (Doi [1971]1973), among others (see especially the
works in Condon and Saito 1974). Although neither the linguistic research
nor the work in the social sciences was framed as research on pragmatics,
the diversity of these pragmatics-relevant studies highlights both the
ubiquity of these phenomena in Japanese language and social interaction, as](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25503714-250511121956-186e11cd/85/Pragmatic-Competence-Naoko-Taguchi-Editor-45-320.jpg)
![24 Dina R. Yoshimi
as a means for communicative interaction” had been overshadowed by
sentential grammar to the virtual exclusion of discourse structure, with the
result being that “students of a foreign language who have learned how to
construct individual grammatical sentences often encounter difficulties
when combining sentences to create a meanful [sic] cohesive discourse”
(1985: 218). Producing these comments in the context of her contrastive
analytic study of discourse organizational principles, Maynard went on to
propose that the findings of such a study and others like it (similarly
focused on contrastive analysis of discourse cohesion) could have
immediate relevance for JFL classroom learning, making it possible “to
incorporate the principles of text and discourse strategies into our daily
teaching” (1985: 228).
While Maynard (1985) does not make any explicit recommendations on
how this incorporation of findings from the literature on discourse
pragmatic research might best be accomplished, Jorden and Walton (1987)
in their bold proposal for the instruction of “truly foreign languages” (such
as Japanese and Chinese) outline a set of “best practices” for classroom
foreign language instruction that are designed specifically to address the
special instructional challenges that arise when the learners’ base language
and their target language of study are markedly different, including in the
domain of pragmatics. Decrying instructional materials that make use of
outdated linguistic explanations, direct translations of English that ignore
target language usage, and instructional dialogs that lack pragmatic and
sociolinguistic information, Jorden and Walton (1987) propose that the
basic unit of learning “must always be a sample discourse” if the student is
to learn how target-natives construct conversations in precisely defined
situations. There is no way for students to predict transition words,
intonations, deletions, and the like without a target-native model” (1987:
123). Yet they do not assume that providing the learner with such a model
will resolve all learning challenges. Rather, they propose the additional
pedagogical innovation of pairing a “linguistically sophisticated target-
native” who will be responsible for producing “truly authentic language
samples” with a “base-native linguist, who shares the students’ mind-set
and who knows through personal experience what it means to be a
foreigner in the target culture, [and who] plays a vital role in analyzing and
explaining, and in making decisions related to situations, pacing, ordering,
and levels of difficulty.” This proposal not only predates the now familiar
debate on the relative merits of implicit vs. explicit instruction of
pragmatics (opting instead for a combination of the two), but also](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25503714-250511121956-186e11cd/85/Pragmatic-Competence-Naoko-Taguchi-Editor-49-320.jpg)
![26 Dina R. Yoshimi
associated with verbal politeness, as well as the underlying Japanese
cultural attitudes toward such politeness phenomena – may also be taken as
an important indicator of a new era in JFL pragmatics. First, manuals on
proper use of polite language had long been the domain of native speakers,
while foreigners, who, at least from an ideological perspective, were not
expected to demonstrate an equivalent level of pragmatic competence in the
Japanese social world (Kubota 2008), had not heretofore been burdened
with similar concerns. Indeed, a version of Japanese language (nihongo) for
the instruction of foreigners had been developed as part of national
language policy precisely because foreigners were not culturally obligated
to speak the language (kokugo) as native Japanese did (Tai 2003). Yet, in
the 1980s, as Japan’s economy boomed and the number of learners of
Japanese expanded exponentially, the perception of Japanese as an exotic
language spoken by a few academic types was overtaken by the expectation
that any foreigner might learn Japanese as a “practical skill with economic
utility” (Coulmas 1989: 129). It is within this cultural and historical context
that the publication of Mizutani and Mizutani’s (1987) manual on
politeness can be viewed as marking the beginning of an upward shift in
the expectations for pragmatic competence (especially polite use of
language) for JFL learners. At the same time, in introducing their volume,
the implicit nature of this shift is made explicit by the authors who state
that they “believe that foreigners can understand any subtle point whatever
in Japanese and can use it if they so desire; we [the authors] do not believe
in a “gaijin Japanese” different from the Japanese of native speakers”
(Mizutani and Mizutani 1987: 3).
3. A fork in the road: Japanese pragmatics and JFL pragmatics part
company
As Japanese pragmatics entered the 1990s, it remained a field energized by
the methodological and theoretical shifts that had taken place in the
preceding decade, and also ready to push forward into new domains of
inquiry. One notable trend was a shift away from a focus on the speaker
(e.g., speaker subjectivity, speaker perspective), and toward a broader
interest in the joint actions – such as “finishing each other’s sentences”
(Hayashi and Mori 1998; Ono and Yoshida 1996) –, and social activities
accomplished by two or more participants engaged in everyday social
interaction, such as floor management in multi-party interaction (Hayashi](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25503714-250511121956-186e11cd/85/Pragmatic-Competence-Naoko-Taguchi-Editor-51-320.jpg)
![From a! to zo: Japanese pragmatics 27
1996) and negotiating (dis)agreement (Mori 1999). To the tradition of
research on discourse cohesion through the study of ellipsis and clause-
conjoining was added a new perspective: Research on the use of discourse
connectives such as datte and dakara, which were examined from a variety
of theoretical perspectives (e.g., Discourse Modality in Maynard 1993;
speech act theory in Kubo 1999; Conversation Analysis in Mori 1995).
Over the past ten years, research in Japanese pragmatics has broken new
ground by challenging the tenability of many longstanding analyses of
grammatical morphemes or syntactic patterns as having functions restricted
by sentence level grammar (cf. Ono, Thompson, and Suzuki [2000] for a
proposal that the distribution of the so-called grammatical morpheme ga,
long referred to as a subject marker, is actually conditioned by discourse-
pragmatic features of interaction; Takagi’s [2002] comprehensive study of
the “multilayered resources” available to conversational participants in
conjunction with the interpretation of unexpressed referents in spoken
discourse, i.e., ellipsis; and Lee and Yonezawa’s [2008] pragmatic account
of overt expression of subject pronouns in casual conversations and other
slightly formal conversational interactions).
In contrast, research in JFL pragmatics took a decidedly different
direction at this point in its history. While researchers and practitioners now
had a much clearer idea of what they needed to teach (cf. the increased
presence and elaboration of cultural notes and usage notes in the textbooks
of this decade such as Nakama and Yookoso!), there seemed to be
considerable uncertainty regarding how best to teach it. With the
communicative revolution sputtering, and the comprehensive approach to
“teaching all of it” (i.e., Jorden with Noda 1987) deemed too burdensome
for learners in most college-level programs to handle, it is perhaps not
surprising that much of JFL research focused on a search for effective
instructional approaches to pragmatics. Following work conducted by
House (1996), Tateyama et al. (1997) and Tateyama (2001, 2007, 2009)
demonstrated that the development of pragmatic competence may be
facilitated by explicit instruction of pragmatic routines combined with
communicative practice and feedback from the teacher. Similarly, Yoshimi
(2001) found that intermediate learners who received explicit instruction on
the effective use of discourse markers in the production of extended
tellings, showed considerable improvement in the appropriateness of their
use of discourse markers as well as in the effectiveness of organizing the
oral production of extended tellings.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25503714-250511121956-186e11cd/85/Pragmatic-Competence-Naoko-Taguchi-Editor-52-320.jpg)
![sec. XVIII, e molti furon degli umidi nel Cinquecento in Italia, e degli
arcadi nel settecento. Uno stato d'animo si può creare in noi e
divenir coerente o rimaner fittizio, secondo che risponda o no alla
speciale fisionomia dell'organismo psichico. Ma poi le idee del tempo
mutano, cangia la moda, i pòmpili seguaci si mettono appresso ad
altre navi. Chi resta? Restano quei pochi, da contar su le dita, quei
pochi che ebbero, primi, l'intuizione straordinaria, o in cui quello
speciale stato d'animo divenne così coerente, che poteron creare
un'opera organica, resistente al tempo e alla moda.
Sul serio poi l'Arcoleo crede che nella nostra letteratura dialettale
non ci sia altro che spirito comico? Egli è siciliano, e certamente ha
letto il Meli, e sa quanto sia ingiusto il giudizio di arcadia superiore
dato della poesia di lui, che non fu sonata soltanto su la zampogna
pastorale, ma ebbe anche tutte le corde della lira e si espresse in
tutte le forme. Non c'è vero e proprio umorismo in tanta parte della
poesia del Meli? Ma basterebbe citar soltanto La cutuliata per
dimostrarlo!
Tic tic... chi fu? Cutuliata.
E non c'è umorismo, vero e proprio umorismo, in tanti e tanti sonetti
del Belli? E senza parlare delle figure del Maggi, il Giovannin Bongè,
il Marchionn di gamb avert di Carlo Porta non son due capolavori
d'umorismo? E, poichè si parla di tipi rimasti imperituri, il Monsù
Travet del Bersezio, il Nobilomo Vidal del Gallina? E un altro scrittore
dialettale abbiamo, finora quasi del tutto ignoto, grandissimo:
umorista vero, se mai ce ne fu, e — a farlo apposta —
meridionalissimo, di Reggio Calabria: Giovanni Merlino, rivelato or
son parecchi anni, in una conferenza[47] da Giuseppe Mantica, suo
conterraneo, che sarebbe stato anche lui un forte scrittore umorista
se, nel breve corso della sua esistenza, la politica non lo avesse
troppo presto distratto dalle lettere. Scrisse il Merlino i suoi libri per
55 lettori, che nomina uno per uno e divide in quattro categorie,
imponendo a ciascuna di esse alcuni speciali obblighi in ricompensa
del piacere loro procurato. Uno de' suoi volumi, ancora tutti inediti, è](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25503714-250511121956-186e11cd/85/Pragmatic-Competence-Naoko-Taguchi-Editor-60-320.jpg)
![detto: Miscellanea di varie cose sconnesse e piacevoli, «fatta per
coloro che, avendo poco cervello, vogliono istruirsi sul modo più
acconcio per perderlo interamente»; gli altri sono Memorie utili ed
inutili ai posteri, ossia la vita di Giovanni Merlino del quondam
Antonio di Reggio, principiata a 27 decembre 1789 e proseguita fino
al 1850, composta di sette volumi. Vorrei poter citare per disteso il
lungo Dialogo alla calabrese tra Domine Dio e Giovanni Merlino o il
Conto con Domine Dio per dimostrare che umorista fosse il Merlino.
Nell'attesa che gli eredi lo rendano a tutti noto pubblicando i volumi,
rimando alla pubblicazione che il Mantica fece di questi due
impareggiabili Dialoghi, con la traduzione a fronte.
Questo, per la letteratura dialettale. Non scopre poi sul serio altro
che ironia e satira l'Arcoleo negli scrittori italiani? Io penso a un certo
Socrate immaginario d'un certo abbate del settecento; penso al
Didimo chierico del Foscolo: ad alcune volate in prosa del Baretti;
penso ai Promessi Sposi del Manzoni, tutto infuso di genuino
umorismo;[48] penso al Sant'Ambrogio del Giusti, vera poesia
umoristica, unica forse tra le tante satiriche o sentimentali; penso a
quei certi dialoghi e a quelle certe prosette del Leopardi; penso
all'Asino e al Buco nel muro del Guerrazzi; penso al Fanfulla del
D'Azeglio; penso a Carlo Bini; penso a quella tal cucina nel castello di
Fratta delle Confessioni d'un ottuagenario del Nievo; penso a Camillo
De Meis, al Revere; e, poichè l'Arcoleo arriva fino a Marco Twain,
penso al Re umorista, al Demonio dello stile, all'Altalena delle
antipatie, al Pietro e Paola, a Scaricalasino, all'Illustrissimo del
Cantoni; al Demetrio Pianelli del De Marchi; penso ai poeti della
scapigliatura lombarda e a tante note di schietto e profondo
umorismo nelle liriche del Carducci e del Graf; penso ai tanti
personaggi umoristici che popolano i romanzi e le novelle del
Fogazzaro, del Farina, del Capuana, del Fucini, e anche ad alcune
opere di più giovani scrittori, da Luigi Antonio Villari all'Albertazzi, al
Panzini... ed ecco, la Lanterna di Diogene di quest'ultimo vorrei porre
in una mano all'Arcoleo e nell'altra la candela del Candelaio del
Bruno: son sicuro che parecchi scrittori umoristi scoprirebbe nella
letteratura italiana antica e nuova.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25503714-250511121956-186e11cd/85/Pragmatic-Competence-Naoko-Taguchi-Editor-61-320.jpg)
![conoscenza sommaria ed esteriore, appunto perchè fondata su
queste sommarie ed esteriori determinazioni.
La caratteristica, ad esempio, di quella tale peculiar bonarietà o
benevola indulgenza che scoprono alcuni nell'umorismo, già definito
del Richter «malinconia d'un animo superiore che giunge a divertirsi
finanche di ciò che lo rattrista»,[49] quel «tranquillo, giocondo e
riflesso sguardo su le cose», quel «modo d'accogliere gli spettacoli
divertenti, che sembra, nella sua moderazione, soddisfare il senso
del ridicolo e domandar perdono di ciò che v'è di poco delicato in tal
compiacimento», quella tale «espansione degli spiriti dall'interno
all'esterno incontrata e ritardata dalla corrente contraria d'una specie
di benevolenza pensosa», di cui parla il Sully nel suo Essai sur le rire,
[50] non si trovano in tutti gli umoristi. Alcuni di questi tratti, che al
critico francese, e non a lui soltanto, pajono principali dell'umorismo,
si troveranno in alcuni, in altri no; e in certuni anzi si troverà il
contrario, come ad esempio nello Swift, che è malinconico nel senso
originario della parola, cioè pieno di fiele; e del resto noi vedremo un
po' più innanzi, parlando del don Abbondio del Manzoni, a che cosa
in fondo si riduca quella peculiar bonarietà o simpatica indulgenza.
Al contrario, quella «acre disposizione a scoprire ed esprimere il
ridicolo del serio e il serio del ridicolo umano», di cui parla il Bonghi,
calzerà allo Swift e a umoristi al pari di lui beffardi e mordaci; non
calzerà ad altri; nè del resto, come osserva il Lipps, opponendosi alla
teoria del Lazzarus, che considera anch'esso l'umorismo soltanto
come una disposizione d'animo, questo modo di considerarlo è
compiuto. Nè compiuto sarà quello del Hegel che lo dice «attitudine
speciale d'intelletto e di animo onde l'artista si pone lui stesso al
posto delle cose», definizione che, a non porsi bene a guardare da
quel solo lato da cui l'Hegel lo guarda, ha tutta l'aria d'un rebus.
Caratteristiche più comuni, e però più generalmente osservate, sono
la «contradizione» fondamentale, a cui si suol dare per causa
principale il disaccordo che il sentimento e la meditazione scoprono o
fra la vita reale e l'ideale umano o fra le nostre aspirazioni e le
nostre debolezze e miserie, e per principale effetto quella tal](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25503714-250511121956-186e11cd/85/Pragmatic-Competence-Naoko-Taguchi-Editor-64-320.jpg)
![che avviene, e che non può non avvenire, in tutti quegli scrittori che
si dicono umoristi.
L'Estetica del Croce è così astratta e negativa, che applicarla alla
critica non è assolutamente possibile, se non a patto di negarla di
continuo, com'egli stesso fa, accettando questi così detti concetti
empirici che, cacciati dalla porta, gli rientrano dalla finestra.
Ah, una bella soddisfazione, la filosofia!
II
Vediamo dunque, senz'altro, qual è il processo da cui risulta quella
particolar rappresentazione che si suol chiamare umoristica; se
questa ha peculiari caratteri che la distinguono, e da che derivano:
se vi è un particolar modo di considerare il mondo, che costituisce
appunto la materia e la ragione dell'umorismo.
Ordinariamente, — ho già detto altrove,[51] e qui m'è forza ripetere
— l'opera d'arte è creata dal libero movimento della vita interiore
che organa le idee e le imagini in una forma armoniosa, di cui tutti
gli elementi han corrispondenza tra loro e con l'idea-madre che le
coordina. La riflessione, durante la concezione, come durante
l'esecuzione dell'opera d'arte, non resta certamente inattiva: assiste
al nascere e al crescere dell'opera, ne segue le fasi progressive e ne
gode, raccosta i varii elementi, li coordina, li compara. La coscienza
non rischiara tutto lo spirito; segnatamente per l'artista, essa non è
un lume distinto dal pensiero, che permetta alla volontà di attingere
in lei come in un tesoro d'immagini e d'idee. La coscienza, in somma,
non è una potenza creatrice; ma lo specchio interiore in cui il
pensiero si rimira; si può dire anzi ch'essa sia il pensiero che vede sè
stesso, assistendo a quello che esso fa spontaneamente. E,
d'ordinario, nell'artista, nel momento della concezione, la riflessione
si nasconde, resta, per così dire, invisibile: è, quasi, per l'artista una
forma del sentimento. Man mano che l'opera si fa, essa la critica,](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/25503714-250511121956-186e11cd/85/Pragmatic-Competence-Naoko-Taguchi-Editor-68-320.jpg)
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- 6. Mouton Series inPragmatics 5 Editor Istvan Kecskes Editorial Board Reinhard Blutner Ferenc Kiefer Universiteit van Amsterdam Hungarian Academy The Netherlands of Sciences Budapest N. J. Enfield Hungary Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics Lluı́s Payrató Nijmegen University of Barcelona The Netherlands Spain Raymond W. Gibbs François Recanati University of California Institut Jean-Nicod Santa Cruz Paris USA France Laurence R. Horn John Searle Yale University University of California USA Berkeley USA Boaz Keysar University of Chicago Deirdre Wilson USA University College London Great Britain Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York
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- 8. Mouton de Gruyter(formerly Mouton, The Hague) is a Division of Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin. 앪 앝 Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pragmatic competence / ed. by Naoko Taguchi. p. cm. ⫺ (Mouton series in pragmatics ; 5) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-3-11-021854-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Japanese language ⫺ Acquisition. 2. Japanese language ⫺ Study and teaching ⫺ Foreign speakers. 3. Pragmatics. 4. Com- municative competence. I. Taguchi, Naoko, 1967⫺ PL524.85.P73 2009 495.615⫺dc22 2009026720 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. ISBN 978-3-11-021854-1 ISSN 1864-6409 쑔 Copyright 2009 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin. All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover design: Martin Zech, Bremen. Printed in Germany.
- 9. Contents (Instead of a)Foreword xiii Gabriele Kasper Pragmatic competence in Japanese as a second language: An introduction 1 Naoko Taguchi From a! to zo: Japanese pragmatics and its contribution to JSL/JFL pedagogy 19 Dina R. Yoshimi Indexing stance in interaction with the Japanese desu/masu and plain forms 41 Kazuto Ishida Advanced learners’ honorific styles in emails and telephone calls 69 Keiko Ikeda Subjectivity and pragmatic choice in L2 Japanese: Emulating and resisting pragmatic norms 101 Noriko Ishihara and Elaine Tarone Requesting in Japanese: The effect of instruction on JFL learners’ pragmatic competence 129 Yumiko Tateyama Influence of learning context on L2 pragmatic realization: A comparison between JSL and JFL learners’ compliment responses 167 Takafumi Shimizu Refusals in Japanese telephone conversations 199 Megumi Kawate-Mierzejewska Comprehending utterances in Japanese as a foreign language: Formulaicity and literality 227 Akiko Hagiwara
- 10. vi Contents Comprehension ofindirect opinions and refusals in L2 Japanese 249 Naoko Taguchi Blended learning for Japanese reactive tokens: Effects of computer-led, instructor-led,and peer-based instruction 275 Takafumi Utashiro and Goh Kawai Development of the use of Japanese sentence-final particles through email correspondence 301 Tomomi Kakegawa Commentary: The social turn in second language acquisition and Japanese pragmatics research: Reflection on ideologies, methodologies and instructional implications 335 Junko Mori Index 359
- 11. Contributors to thisvolume Akiko Hagiwara is currently teaching English to life science majors at Tokyo University of Pharmacy and Life Sciences. She has also taught Japanese in China as well as in Hawaii. Her interests range from pragmatics to corpus linguistics. Keiko Ikeda obtained her Ph.D. in Japanese linguistics from University of Hawai’i at Mānoa in 2007. Her main research areas are sociolinguistics and discourse studies focusing on various dimensions of contemporary Japan. She is currently an Associate Professor at Nagoya University. Kazutoh Ishida is a doctoral student in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. His research interests are in discourse analysis and pedagogy with a focus on pragmatics. His publications include an article in the Journal of Pragmatics and a chapter in Pragmatics in Language Learning, Theory, and Practice. Noriko Ishihara received her Ph. D. in Curriculum and Instruction, Second Languages/Cultures Education from the University of Minnesota, and is currently Associate Professor at Hosei University, Japan. She has taught ESL/EFL and teacher preparation courses in TESOL and instructional pragmatics. Her research interests include pragmatics and identity in language education, pragmatics-focused instruction/assessment, and professional language teacher development. Tomomi Kakegawa currently teaches Japanese at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. She received a Ph. D. in Linguistics from Michigan State University, an MA in Comparative Literature from Pennsylvania State University, and a BA in Teaching Japanese as a Foreign Language from the International Christian University in Tokyo, Japan. Her research interests include second language acquisition, Japanese pedagogy, and syntax of noun phrases. Gabriele Kasper is Professor of Second Language Studies at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. Among her publications are Talk-in- Interaction: Multilingual Perspectives (Nguyen and Kasper, 2009), Misunderstanding in Social Life (House, Kasper, and Ross, 2003), Pragmatic Development in a Second Language (Kasper and Rose, 2002),
- 12. viii Contributors and Pragmaticsin Language Teaching (Rose and Kasper, 2001). Her past work centered on sociolinguistic, psycholinguistic, and methodological aspects of interlanguage pragmatics. Currently her research focuses on applying conversation analysis to the study of second language interaction and learning and on qualitative research in second language studies. Goh Kawai is an associate professor at Hokkaido University, Research Faculty of Media and Communication. He holds a PhD in information and communication engineering from the University of Tokyo. He integrates language processing technology, linguistics, and pedagogy for the purpose of nonnative language learning (e.g., automated pronunciation learning, computer-mediated communication tools for instructor-led learning, and peer-based asynchronous writing activities). His website is http://www.kawai.com/goh/. Megumi Kawate-Mierzejewska (Ed.D) currently teaches cross-cultural pragmatics and other subjects at Temple University Japan Campus. She is one of the founders of Japan Association for Language Teaching (JALT) pragmatics Special Interest Group (SIG) and coordinator of the SIG (2004.11-2009.11). She has published many articles. Her research interests include interlanguage and cross-cultural pragmatics, neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and language testing. Junko Mori is Professor of Japanese Language and Linguistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests center on the conversation analytic study of talk-in-interaction involving first and second language speakers of Japanese. Her work has appeared in journals such as Applied Linguistics, Journal of Pragmatics, Modern Language Journal, Pragmatics, Research on Language and Social Interaction as well as a number of edited volumes. Takafumi Shimizu (Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics, University of London) is an associate professor in the Faculty of Liberal Arts and the Graduate School of Foreign Studies at Sophia University, Tokyo. His research interests include cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics, second language acquisition, and language pedagogy from the viewpoint of teaching pragmatic and discourse aspects of language.
- 13. Contributors ix Elaine Taroneis Distinguished Teaching Professor in Second language Studies, and Director of CARLA (Center for Advanced Research in Language Acquisition) in the Office of International Programs at the University of Minnesota. Her research interests include variation theory in second language acquisition (SLA), the impact of literacy on SLA, and language teacher education. Yumiko Tateyama is an instructor at the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa where she received her Ph.D. Her research interests include interlanguage pragmatics, second language learning and teaching, conversation analysis, and translation and interpretation. She has published studies on the development of JFL learners’ pragmatic competence. Naoko Taguchi is Assistant Professor of Japanese and Second Language Acquisition at Carnegie Mellon University. Being a Fulbright recipient, she completed her Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics at Northern Arizona University. Her research interests include interlanguage pragmatics, second language fluency, and classroom-based research. Takafumi Utashiro is a PhD candidate in Department of Human System Science, Graduate School of Decision Science and Technology at Tokyo Institute of Technology. He taught Japanese in Taiwan. His research interests include computer-assisted language learning, second-language learning and teaching, pragmatics of language learning and teaching specially in JFL/JSL contexts. Dina Rudolph Yoshimi is Associate Professor of Japanese at the University of Hawai’i- Mānoa. A commitment to increasing cross-cultural communication between the United States and Asia guides her research on professor-student interaction at the graduate level in the U.S. and Japan, and her work on developing innovative approaches to classroom foreign language instruction of everyday conversational interaction and pragmatic awareness.
- 15. Acknowledgements A long-term projectlike this makes us appreciate the help we receive from a large number of people without whose kindness, dedication, and support it would be impossible to complete our work. First and foremost, I would like to thank Istvan Kecskes, the editor of the Mouton Series in Pragmatics, and the reviewers commissioned by Mouton de Gruyter, for their thorough feedback and suggestions, which were invaluable in producing this book. I would also like to thank all of the contributors to this volume for their insightful work, cooperation, and their commitment as we worked our way through revisions during internal and external reviews. Special thanks go to Dina Yoshimi and Junko Mori whose sage advice at the initial phase helped me clarify the vision of the volume, and to Gabrielle Kasper for her detailed comments on the book proposal. The idea for this book arose when I was participating in the 17th international conference on Pragmatics and Language Learning in 2007. I thank the organizing committee at University of Hawaii at Manoa for the inspiration. Finally, I wish to express my sincere gratitude to the reviewers of individual manuscripts: Mariana Achugar, Sono Takano Hynes, Yasufumi Iwasaki, Tadayoshi Kaya, Shuai Li, Shoichi Matsumura, Masahiro Takimoto, Camilla Vasquez, Heidi Vellenga, Ruth Wyle, and Dina Yoshimi. I would also like to thank Yan Liu for her assistance with proof-editing. I feel privileged to be associated with these many people whose efforts culminate in the publication of this volume, and I am deeply indebted to all. Naoko Taguchi April 1, 2009 Pittsburgh
- 17. (Instead of a)Foreword Gabriele Kasper In the history of interlanguage pragmatics (ILP), research on Japanese has played a prominent role. Following the lead of English as the most commonly studied target language in ILP, Japanese is next in line, and not only because of the sheer volume of the L2 Japanese literature. From its beginnings in the early 1990s, J-ILP has taken a broader and more inclusive view of its objects of interest than the wider domain of ILP. The field at large derived its agenda predominantly from speech act theory and politeness theory, and consequently has been mostly interested in describing how L2 speakers understand, produce, and acquire speech acts in another language. By contrast, J-ILP put special emphasis on the indexical resources that are critical to interaction in Japanese yet difficult to learn and teach. Two categories of indexicals that have attracted sustained attention are interactional particles and honorific speech styles. Aside from its intrinsic value, the research on these objects is instructive from a historical perspective because it generated several “firsts” in ILP. Sawyer’s (1992) study on JSL learners’ use of the interactional particle ne inaugurated a lively research tradition that has since examined how Japanese L2 speakers use the marker, and change their use of it over time, inside and outside of instructional settings. ILP classroom research explores how learners can be helped to understand and produce ne and other interactional particles effectively through instructional intervention. Sawyer’s ne study was also one of the first to investigate L2 pragmatic development longitudinally, preceded only by Schmidt’s seminal research (Schmidt 1983; Schmidt and Frota 1986). In a series of studies, Ohta (1999, 2001a, b) showed how students’ use of ne-marked listener responses evolved in peer interaction over time. These studies advanced our understanding of L2 pragmatic development substantially by showing that despite much individual variation, learners progress through discernible phases as they become progressively interactionally competent in providing third-turn responses. In a study on pragmatic transfer, one of the early key topics in ILP, Yoshimi (1999) explained the learner’s use of ne in conversation with an L1 Japanese speaking peer from the perspective of the learner’s socialization into the discursive practices of L1 English speakers. Most recently, M. Ishida traced the development of ne-marked assessments in microgenetic perspective, over the course of a short peer activity (2006),
- 18. xiv Gabriele Kasper andontogenetically in diverse contexts over an observation period of several months (2009). Complementing acquisitional records of ne-marked assessments “in the wild” are planned pedagogical interventions for the instructed learning of interactional markers over extended periods of time. Yoshimi (2001) found that after explicit teaching of how to use the interactional markers n desu, n desu kedo and n desu ne in extended conversational tellings, students showed distinct improvement in the overall organization of the activity through these markers, whereas the internal structuring of the tellings remained less successful. Similarly, Kakegawa (this volume) shows that in email exchanges between JFL students and their L1 Japanese keypals, the students use the interactional particles ne, no, yo, and yone more frequently and more accurately after two explicit interventions. Beyond reassuring language educators that interactional markers are teachable and offering models for effective pedagogical action, the studies give us more nuanced insights into which of these objects and their intricate usages are learned faster and more successfully, and where learners continue to struggle despite carefully designed intervention. As all good research, these interventional studies open up new trajectories for more subtle and complex questions to be examined in the work ahead. When Ken Rose and I prepared our edited volume on Pragmatics in Language Teaching (2001), one reviewer complained that our proposal included too many chapters on Japanese. Indeed, of eight chapters on classroom research, four were on JFL (Cook 2001; Ohta 2001; Tateyama 2001; Yoshimi, 2001). We assured the publisher that we had tried very hard to identify data-based studies on instruction in the pragmatics of other target languages, but to no avail. At the end of the last millennium, J-ILP was the Mount Fuji in the landscape of ILP classroom research. But J-ILP also pioneered research on L2 pragmatic development in the environment that is often seen as a counterpart to the language classroom, the in-country sojourn during study abroad. Hashimoto (1993) and Marriott (1993, 1995) found that after study abroad in Japan, Australian high-school students strongly increased their use of plain style over desu/masu style, extending it from interactions with peers to teachers and older adults. Learners’ shift away from L2 sociolinguistic norms towards an overall more informal style –a development not limited to Japanese (Regan 1995)–called into question the popular belief that study abroad is a panacea for the shortcomings of foreign language instruction. As subsequent studies highlighted, although living and studying in-country – by design if not always in practice–offers learners opportunities to participate in a wide range of socially consequential activities, their participation may be constrained not only by
- 19. (Instead of a)Foreword xv limited L2 resources but also by identity-implicative pragmatic ideologies. Poststructuralist identity theories, conceptualizing identity as relational, mobile, and discursively co-constructed in social practices, afforded new perspectives on the “indexical order” (Silverstein 2003) generated through the selection and shift of speech styles. Siegal’s (1995, 1996) ethnographic study on the development of sociolinguistic competencies during study abroad in Japan drew attention to the socio-pragmatic ambivalences that female L2 speakers of Japanese faced in ceremonial and asymmetrical institutional speech activities. For these students, the normative requirements for humble and honorific styles were incompatible with their egalitarian ideologies. Two critical outcomes from Siegal’s studies have since become salient topics in L2 pragmatic and discourse socialization research, namely that learners may contest, resist, and on occasion transform L2 pragmatic practices and ideologies, and that their own pragmatic ideologies and discursive practices may undergo revision over time. Together with research on the indexicalities of speech style in L1 socialization (e.g., Cook 1996, 1997), these studies prefigure Cook’s (2008) recent investigation on shifts between plain and desu/masu style as practices to index “modes of self” during dinner table conversations among home-staying students and their host families (Cook 2008). The complex interrelation of indexical orders, ideologies, and identities is a key topic in discursively grounded research on intercultural pragmatics and communication. In this arena, too, studies on interactions between speakers of Japanese as a first and second language initiated new research directions. In two seminal studies, Nishizaka (1995, 1999) examined a radio talk show with non-Japanese students in Japan from the ethnomethodological traditions of conversation analysis (CA) and membership categorization analysis (MCA). Together with recent versions of interactional sociolinguistics and ethnographic microanalysis, these analytical perspectives fuel a research program on “intercultural communication” in which participants’ membership in different cultures is seen as an occasioned interactional accomplishment rather than as a permanent “trait”, a stable identity category pre-existing its discursive co-production. Through their talk, participants assemble such paired contrast categories as nihonjin- gaijin, each reflexively associated with normatively expected and mutually exclusive predicates. Several studies show how participants in “intercultural” interaction discursively assign, assume, resist, deflect, and subvert membership in cultural and other categories (cf. Cook 2006; Fukuda 2006; Iino 1999, 2006; Mori 2003; Nishizaka 1995, 1999; Suzuki
- 20. xvi Gabriele Kasper 2009,Zimmerman 2007). This research urges us to question entrenched beliefs about “culture” and what exactly might be meant by “intercultural”. As such, it has profound implications for JSL/JFL curricula, teaching practices, and training programs for international cooperation and exchange. I have focused this brief discussion of J-ILP’s contribution to ILP on socio-discursive research traditions because it is here, in my reading of the literature, that J-ILP has made its most visible mark. But J-ILP has advanced ILP research on classic SLA themes from psycholinguistic perspectives as well, including pragmatic comprehension, the veteran of ILP topics (Taguchi 2008c), pragmatic transfer (Ikoma and Shimura 1994; Saito and Beecken 1997), negotiation of meaning (McMeekin 2006), and the relative effectiveness of explicit and implicit teaching (Tateyama 2001; Tateyama et al. 1997). While these studies have contributed to bringing ILP research into the SLA mainstream, they also highlight the benefits of incorporating psycholinguistic studies of L2 pragmatic use, learning, and teaching for SLA. Taguchi’s extensive experimental research program on L2 speech act comprehension and production (2002, 2005, 2007a, b, 2008a, b, c) demonstrates in particular the need to systematically anchor tasks for language learning and testing in theories of cognitive processing and pragmatic theory and research. Naoko Taguchi’s volume offers a panoramic view of the diverse topics that emerged in two decades of Japanese interlanguage pragmatics: interactional particles, honorific speech styles, understanding and producing speech acts; identities and ideologies; resisting and adapting L2 pragmatic norms; pragmatic development over time, and the effect of instruction and learning context on learning processes and outcomes. The editor’s introduction effectively locates the volume in the context of interlanguage pragmatics research and previews the following chapters. Dina Yoshimi and Junko Mori frame the reports on empirical studies in the contexts of two sets of relationships. Yoshimi lays out the connections between Japanese pragmatics and L2 Japanese pedagogy in historical perspective, critically scrutinizing the changing ways in which scholarship on the pragmatics of Japanese has informed pedagogical vision and practice. Mori locates J-ILP in current debates reconsidering from socially grounded perspectives what it means to be a second language speaker and learner, and the implications of socio-discursive approaches for researching and teaching the pragmatics of Japanese. Watching from the sidelines how J-ILP developed during the past twenty years has been one of the intellectual pleasures of my academic life.
- 21. (Instead of a)Foreword xvii This volume documents the state-of-the-art in the field and advances an enriched agenda for J-ILP as it enters its third decade. To the editor and contributors, congratulations to an impressive accomplishment, and to J- ILP, korekara mo gambatte kudasai. References Cook, Haruko 1996 Japanese language socialization: Indexing the modes of self. Discourse Processes 22: 171-197. 1997 The role of the Japanese masu form in caregiver-child conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 28: 695-718. 1999 Situational meanings of Japanese social deixis: The mixed use of the masu and plain forms. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 8: 87-110. 2001 Why can’t learners of JFL distinguish polite from impolite speech styles? In: Kenneth R. Rose and Gabriele Kasper (eds.), Pragmatics in Language Teaching, 80-102. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2006 Joint construction of folk beliefs by JFL learners and Japanese host families. In: Margaret A. DuFon and Eton Churchill (eds.), Language Learners in Study Abroad Contexts, 120-150. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. 2008 Socializing Identities Through Speech Style. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Fukuda, Chie 2006 Resistance against being formulated as cultural other: The case of a Chinese student in Japan. Pragmatics 16: 429-456. Hashimoto, Hiroko 1993 Language acquisition of an exchange student within the homestay environment. Journal of Asian Pacific Communication 4: 209-224. Iino, Masakazu 1999 Language use and identity in contact situations. In: Lawrence F. Bouton (ed.), Pragmatics and Language Learning Monograph Series, Vol. 9, 129-162. Urbana, IL.: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Division of English as an International Language.
- 22. xviii Gabriele Kasper 2006Norms of interaction in a Japanese homestay setting: Toward two-way flow of linguistic and cultural resources. In: Margaret A. DuFon and Eton Churchill (eds.), Language Learners in Study Abroad Contexts, 151-173. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Ikoma, Tomoko and Akihiko Shimura 1993 Pragmatic transfer in the speech act of refusals in Japanese as a second language. Journal of Asian Pacific Communication 5: 105-129. Ishida, Midori 2006 Interactional competence and the use of modal expressions in decision-making activities: CA for understanding microgenesis of pragmatic competence. In: Kathleen Bardovi- Harlig, César Félix-Brasdefer, and Alwiya S. Omar (eds.), Pragmatics and Language Learning Volume 11, 55-79. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i at Manoa, National Foreign Language Resource Center. 2009 Development of interactional competence: Changes in the use of ne in L2 Japanese during study abroad. In: Hanh thi Nguyen and Gabriele Kasper (eds.), Talk-in-interaction: Multilingual Perspectives, 351-385. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i at Manoa, National Foreign Language Resource Center. Marriott, Helen 1993 Acquiring sociolinguistic competence: Australian secondary students in Japan. Journal of Asian Pacific Communication 4: 167-192. 1995 The acquisition of politeness patterns by exchange students in Japan. In: Margaret A. DuFon and Eton Churchill (eds.), Second Language Acquisition in a Study Abroad Context, 197- 224. Amsterdam: Benjamins. McMeekin, Abby 2006 Negotiation in a Japanese study abroad setting. In: Margaret A. DuFon and Eton Churchill (eds.), Language Learners in Study Abroad Contexts, 31-58. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Mori, Junko 2003 The construction of interculturality: A study of initial encounters between Japanese and American students. Research on Language and Social Interaction 36: 143-184. Nishizaka, Aug 1995 The interactive constitution of interculturality: How to be a Japanese with words. Human Studies 18: 301-326.
- 23. (Instead of a)Foreword xix 1999 Doing interpreting within interaction: The interactive accomplishments of a “Henna Gaijin” or “Strange Foreigner.” Human Studies 22: 235-251. Ohta, Amy Snyder 1999 Interactional routines and the socialization of interactional style in adult learners of Japanese. Journal of Pragmatics 31(11): 1493–1512. 2001a A longitudinal study of the development of expression of alignment in Japanese as a foreign language. In: Kenneth R. Rose and Gabriele Kasper (eds.), Pragmatics in Language Teaching, 103-120. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2001b Second Language Acquisition Processes in the Classroom: Learning Japanese. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Regan, Vera 1995 The acquisition of sociolinguistic native speech norms: Effects of a year abroad on second language learners of French. In: Barbara F. Freed (ed.), Second Language Acquisition in a Study Abroad Context, 245-267. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Saito, Hidetoshi and Masako Beecken 1997 An approach to instruction of pragmatic aspects: Implications of pragmatic transfer by American learners of Japanese. The Modern Language Journal 81: 363-377. Sawyer, Mark 1992 The development of pragmatics in Japanese as a second language: The sentence-final particle ne. In: Gabriele Kasper (ed.), Pragmatics of Japanese as Native and Target Language, 83-125. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i at Manoa, Second Language Teaching and Curriculum Center. Schmidt, Richard 1983 Interaction, acculturation, and the acquisition of communicative competence: A case study of one adult. In: Nessa Wolfson and Elliot Judd (eds.), Sociolinguistics and Language Acquisition, 137-174. Rowley, MA: Newbury House. Schmidt, Richard and Sylvia Nagem Frota 1986 Developing basic conversational ability in a second language: A case study of an adult learner of Portuguese. In: Richard Day (ed.), Talking to Learn: Conversation in Second Language Acquisition, 237-326. New York: Newbury House.
- 24. xx Gabriele Kasper Siegal,Meryl 1995 Individual differences and study abroad: Women learning Japanese in Japan. In: Barbara F. Freed (ed.), Second Language Acquisition in a Study Abroad Context, 225-244. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 1996 The role of learner subjectivity in second language sociolinguistic competency: Western women learning Japanese. Applied Linguistics 17: 356-382. Silverstein, Michael 2003 Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language and Communication 23 (3-4): 193-229. Suzuki, Asuka 2009 When “gaijin” matters: Theory-building in Japanese multiparty conversation. In: Hanh thi Nguyen and Gabriele Kasper (eds.), Talk-in-interaction: Multilingual Perspectives, 89-109. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i, National Foreign Language Resource Center. Taguchi, Naoko 2002 An application of relevance theory to the analysis of L2 interpretation processes: The comprehension of indirect replies. International Review of Applied Linguistics 40: 151- 176. 2005 Comprehending implied meaning in English as a second language. Modern Language Journal 89: 543-562. 2007a Development of speed and accuracy in pragmatic comprehension of English as a foreign language. TESOL Quarterly 41: 313-338. 2007b Task difficulty in oral speech act production. Applied Linguistics 28: 113-135. 2008a Cognition, language contact, and development of pragmatic comprehension in a study-abroad context. Language Learning 58: 33-71. 2008b Pragmatic comprehension in Japanese as a foreign language. The Modern Language Journal 92: 558-576. 2008c The role of learning environment in the development of pragmatic comprehension: A comparison of gains between EFL and ESL learners. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 30: 423-452. Tateyama, Yumiko 2001 Explicit and implicit teaching of pragmatic routines: Japanese sumimasen. In: Kenneth R. Rose and Gabriele Kasper (eds.), Pragmatics in Language Teaching, 200-222. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- 25. (Instead of a)Foreword xxi Tateyama, Yumiko, Gabriele Kasper, Lara P. Mui, Hui-Mian Tay and Ong-on Thananart 1997 Explicit and implicit teaching of pragmatic routines. In: Lawrence F. Bouton (ed.), Pragmatics and Language Learning Monograph Series Vol. 8, 163-177. Urbana- Champaign, IL: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Yoshimi, Dina R. 1999 L1 language socialization as a variable in the use of ne by L2 learners of Japanese. Journal of Pragmatics 31(11): 1513- 1525. 2001 Explicit instruction and JFL learner’s use of interactional discourse markers. In: Kenneth R. Rose and Gabriele Kasper (eds.), Pragmatics in Language Teaching, 223-244. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zimmerman, Erica 2007 Constructing Korean and Japanese interculturality in talk: Ethnic membership categorization among users of Japanese. Pragmatics 17: 71-94.
- 26. Pragmatic competence inJapanese as a second language: An introduction Naoko Taguchi 1. Introduction Pragmatic competence, broadly defined as the ability to use language appropriately in a social context, has become an object of inquiry in a wide range of disciplines including linguistics, applied linguistics, anthropology, sociology, psychology, communication research, and cross-cultural studies. In the disciplines of applied linguistics and second language acquisition (SLA), the study of pragmatic competence has been driven by several fundamental questions. Those questions include: What does it mean to become pragmatically competent in a second language (L2)? How can we examine pragmatic competence to make inferences of its development among L2 learners? In what ways do research findings inform teaching and assessment of pragmatic competence? These questions suggest that construct definition, empirical methods, and application of research findings to practice are at the centers of pragmatics research in SLA. This book explores these key issues in Japanese as a second language. Ten empirical studies in collection target select pragmatic features of Japanese and investigate the learners’ use of them as an indicator of their pragmatic competence. The target pragmatic features are wide-ranging, among them honorifics, speech style, reactive tokens, sentence-final particles, speech acts of various types, formulaic utterances, and indirect expressions. Each study explicitly prompts the connection between pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics in the Japanese language. Pragmalinguistics refers to the linguistic resources available to perform pragmatic functions, while sociopragmatics refers to the appropriateness of the linguistic resources in a given cultural context (Leech 1983; Thomas 1983). Being pragmatically competent requires both types of knowledge, as well as processing skills that mobilize the knowledge in real time communication. Learners need to have a range of linguistic forms (e.g., grammar and lexis) at their disposal to perform language functions (e.g., greeting). At the same time, they need to understand sociocultural norms and rules that govern the usage of these forms (e.g., what to say to greet
- 27. 2 Naoko Taguchi whom).By documenting the understanding and use of them among learners of Japanese spanning multiple levels and time durations, this book offers insight about the nature and development of pragmatic competence in L2 Japanese, as well as implications for the learning and teaching of Japanese pragmatics. This book has several broader purposes. First, it responds to the intense interest that pragmatic competence has accumulated in the field, corresponding with the recent advancement of internationalization and multiculturalism. The 21st century has brought a swift advance of globalization in countless areas, among them technology, computer science, and business. Responding to such changes, the development of L2 proficiency that could enhance mobility across the international community has been a major goal in second language education. Such proficiency inevitably involves a mastery of sociocultural usage of the language in its communicative context. Because language is a tool to perform social functions and develop interpersonal relationships, pragmatic competence – the ability to convey and interpret meaning appropriately in a social situation – is an important skill to develop in order to become a competent speaker in the international community. The importance of pragmatic competence has been articulated both in theory and practice. On theoretical grounds, in the 1980s and 1990s, drawing on Hymes’ (1972) notion of communicative competence, theoretical models of L2 communicative competence emerged in the field (Bachman 1990; Bachman and Palmer 1996; Canale and Swain 1980). More recently, interactional competence (Young and He 1998; Young 2000) and “symbolic competence” (Kramsch and Whiteside 2008), which focus on the dialogic aspect of communication, have been proposed as an alternative notion to the models of communicative competence. These theoretical models have advanced the field by situating pragmatic and sociolinguistic competence as a distinct, indispensable component within L2 proficiency. At the same time, the models have served as a guiding framework for the empirical investigation of said competence. Ability to perform language functions and knowledge of socially appropriate language use had to be operationalized in some way as a measurable construct, and specific tasks, instruments, and analytical methods were explored to elicit and examine this construct. A bulk of L2 pragmatics research produced in the last few decades exemplifies diverse methodological options, ranging from ethnographic studies that involve
- 28. Introduction 3 observation ofnaturalistic interaction to descriptive-quantitative studies that use construct-eliciting instruments. Correspondingly, these models of communicative competence have been applied to practice in second language pedagogy and assessment. Communicative Language Teaching, the Notional-Functional approach, and task-based instruction all include pragmatic and sociocultural aspects as important objectives of instruction (see Richards and Rodgers 2001 for review). Standardized assessment measures such as ACTFL (American Council of Teachers of Foreign Languages, 1999), the Common European Framework (Council of Europe 2001), and the Canadian Language Benchmarks (Pawlikowska-Smith 2002) have also designated pragmatic competence as the target construct of measurement. These trends have fortified the claim that pragmatic competence should be analyzed, taught, and assessed in the course of L2 development. In response to these theoretical, empirical, and practical interests, a number of books and special issues on second language pragmatics have been published over the last few decades. Some are research monographs that document pragmatic performance of particular individuals and groups (Barron 2002; Gass and Neu 1996). Others are edited volumes with specific themes, including: cross-cultural pragmatics (Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper 1989; Gass and Houck 1999; Kasper and Blum-Kulka 1993; Spencer-Oatey 2000), pragmatic development (Barron and Warga 2007; Kasper and Rose 2002), pragmatics in instructional contexts (Bardovi- Harlig and Mahan-Taylor 2003; Ishihara and Cohen 2008; LoCastro 2003; Martínez Flor, et al. 2003; Rose and Kasper 2001; Yoshimi and Wang 2007), pragmatic testing, (Hudson, Detmer, and Brown 1994; Röver 2005; Trosborg 1995; Yamashita 1996), and pragmatics in institutional discourse (Bardovi-Harlig and Hartford 2005). Only a few volumes have focused on pragmatics in an L2 other than English (Kasper 1992, 1995; Márquez- Reiter and Placencia 2004), and among them, Kasper (1992) is the only volume that has addressed pragmatics in L2 Japanese. Hence, there is a need for an updated volume that compiles diverse empirical findings among learners of Japanese, and this book intends to satisfy that need. This book on Japanese pragmatics not only adds to the depth and scope of pragmatics research, but also aims to facilitate the dialogue between the universality and language-specific aspects of pragmatics. The universality of pragmatics has been discussed widely across disciplines. In the field of philosophy, early pragmatics theories–Speech Act Theory (Austin 1962), Seale’s (1969) notion of direct and indirect speech acts, theories of
- 29. 4 Naoko Taguchi politeness(Brown and Levinson 1987; Lakoff 1973; Leech 1983), Grice’s (1975) Cooperative Principles and Sperber and Wilson’s (1995) Relevance Theory – all served as a common framework for examining pragmatic phenomena across languages. Although the universality of these theories is not free from criticisms, because they have been applied to diverse language communities, there is some commonality in the ways that people conceptualize pragmatics. In the fields of developmental psychology, communication pathology, and language acquisition, on the other hand, it is uniformly understood that pragmatic competence is part of human social cognition and develops naturally as linguistic and cognitive abilities mature. Strong evidence comes from neuroscience research that revealed that the right hemisphere is responsible for pragmatic functions, specifically those that involve inferential processing based on discoursal and contextual information (e.g., understanding irony, humor, and metaphors). Research shows that damage to the right hemisphere results in communication disorders and social handicaps (Paradis 1998). Research in linguistic anthropology and language socialization, on the other hand, views acquisition of pragmatic competence as part of the socialization process in which children are enculturated into society and acquire specific manners of communication that reflect beliefs and values in the given culture (Schieffelin and Ochs 1986). These literatures together suggest that pragmatic competence involves both innate and learned capacities, and develops naturally as one gains a full participation and membership in a society. Drawing on Ochs’s (1996) notion of universal cultural principles, Kasper and Rose (2002) provided a list of universal pragmatic principles that comprise implicit knowledge and abilities people use to encode a variety of linguistic and social conventions. Those principles include rituals of conversation such as turn-taking and repair (Goffman 1976), inferencing heuristics and presuppositions (Grice 1975; Holtgraves 2008), routine formulae in recurrent communicative situations (Kecskes 2003; Schmitt 2004), and discursive construction of social identity (Bakhtin 1986). Such knowledge and skills are shared cross-culturally and determine the resources that competent adult speakers draw on while communicating. These universal principles, in turn, serve as a framework applied to examine cross-linguistic variation of pragmatic practice, because linguistic and non-linguistic means to practice those principles, as well as norms and conventions behind the practice, are often found language-specific. Wierzbicka (1991, 1994) argued that characteristics of speaking in a given
- 30. Introduction 5 community arethe manifestation of a tacit system of cultural rules that reflect a society’s way of speaking. For instance, in North America the speech act of apology presupposes a condition – “I did something bad” – and is uttered when one is at fault. Unlike in North America, in Japan, apology presupposes a condition – “I feel something bad”– and is uttered to show sympathy or reconciliation even when one is not at fault (Wierzbicka 1994). Hence, beyond the linguistic level, there are qualitative differences between Japanese and English apology owing to divergent cultural norms. Consequently, these differences lead to variation in the behavior of apology – when to apologize for what purposes. This is just one example that variation in the way of communication is a portrayal of culture-specific attitudes, assumptions, and norms. For second language learners, it is this considerable cross-linguistic variation in encoding and decoding pragmatic functions that makes pragmatic competence difficult to acquire. Cross-linguistic variation in pragmatic practice has been documented extensively over the last few decades in the areas of contrastive pragmatics, cross-cultural communication, and interlanguage pragmatics (e.g., Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper 1989; Boxer 2002; Gudykunst and Kim 2004). A myriad of empirical data was collected on the linguistic and non-linguistic forms to realize pragmatic acts, and variation across languages were found in their realization patterns, often intertwined with norms and values in the given culture. These empirical data reiterate that acquisition of pragmatic competence entails gaining knowledge of language-specific linguistic and non-linguistic behaviors, and sociocultural norms and conventions behind the behaviors. This book, dedicated to Japanese pragmatics, contributes to the discussion of pragmatics-specific-to-languages. It presents a range of pragmatic devices involved in the structure and discourse of Japanese language, for instance, how people convey appropriate levels of politeness in Japanese, or what linguistic resources they use to communicate meaning indirectly. The ten empirical papers in this collection describe what Japanese pragmatics entails, linguistically and culturally, and how it could be applied to the analysis of L2 pragmatic competence. To this end, this book will serve scholars who are interested in research in interlanguage pragmatics and second language acquisition specific to languages. With equal emphasis, we hope that this book serves as a resource for teachers, program coordinators, and supervisors involved in Japanese language education, as well as learners of Japanese who wish to gain
- 31. 6 Naoko Taguchi advancedlevel proficiency. Pragmatic competence has become a keen interest among practitioners involved in the teaching of Japanese, corresponding to a steady increase in the population of Japanese learners around the world and widespread Japanese language institutions serving for the population. In the 1980s, Japanese language became one of the top choices of foreign language education, largely due to Japan’s dramatic economic development and contributions to the international community. As of 2006, Japanese language education is underway in 133 countries other than Japan, and approximately 2.98 million students study Japanese (The Japan Foundation 2008). Compared to the 1979 data, the number of Japanese language institutions increased by 12 times, the number of teachers by 11 times, and the number of students by 23 times. The most notable growth is found in higher education and non-academic institutions. Currently 109 countries offer Japanese language courses as major/minor or electives in universities and colleges. Over the last three years, the number of institutions increased by about 30%, and the number of students and teachers increased by 50%. Non-academic institutions showed even greater increases. The popularity of Japanese language education is largely attributed to political and economic reasons (The Japan Foundation 2008). For instance, in Indonesia, the number of Japanese language students grew 3.2 times over the last three years because nation-wide educational reforms allowed students to choose Japanese as an elective subject in secondary schools. India, on the other hand, marked the second highest growth rate in the number of Japanese language students because of its economic boom and the expansion of Japanese corporations. The recent sharp increase in the number of students in Southeast Asia (e.g., Thailand, Philippines, and Viet Nam) also reflects their need and desire to strengthen economic ties with Japan. Similarly, in China, learning Japanese is advantageous in job placement due to the rapid expansion of Japanese corporations in the country. Students study Japanese for university entrance exams or qualification exams for the purpose of future employment or study abroad in Japan. The popularity of the Japanese language, however, is not limited to utility-based, instrumental factors. Interest in Japanese culture and communication has also contributed to the enthusiasm toward studying Japanese. According to the Japan Foundation (2008), the top three reasons for Japanese study were: to learn about Japanese culture, to be able to communicate using Japanese, and interest in the Japanese language itself.
- 32. Introduction 7 At thelevels of primary and secondary education, students expressed genuine interest in communicating with Japanese people, developing cross- cultural understanding, and engaging in exchange activities with Japan. Recent expansion of Japanese pop culture and cultural borrowing phenomena (e.g., anime, manga, video games, J-pop music, Japanese cuisine) have no doubt contributed to the integrated motivation toward the study of Japanese found among youth. Long-term recognition of Japanese language and culture in the international community, accompanied by the growing population of Japanese language learners in the global society, suggests that this scholarly volume on Japanese pragmatics is a timely addition to the field. We hope that this volume encourages researchers of Japanese to explore central characteristics of the construct of Japanese pragmatic competence, both from language-universal and Japanese-specific standpoints, and to link those to principled methods through which the nature and development of pragmatic competence can be examined. We also hope that the empirical findings presented in this volume are of use for practitioners, encouraging them to explore creative ways to deal with pragmatic issues in their classrooms. Finally, we hope that this volume invites researchers and teachers in other language groups to imagine the uniqueness and commonalities of pragmatic practice inherent to individual languages. An exploration of pragmatic competence within and across language communities will promote a more comprehensive understanding of communicative abilities, and in turn help advance the practice of SLA research and second language education. 2. Scope and content of this book This book has three sections. The first section offers a general overview and historical sketch of the study of Japanese pragmatics and its influence on Japanese pedagogy and curriculum. The overview chapter is followed by ten empirical findings, each dealing with phenomena that are significant in Japanese pragmatics. The ten studies collectively develop a framework of pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics in Japanese, and reveal challenges and opportunities that have to be considered for learners of Japanese. The last section presents a critical reflection on the empirical papers and prompts a discussion of the practice of Japanese pragmatics research. Below I will introduce each contribution in the collection, highlighting initial interconnections and differences.
- 33. 8 Naoko Taguchi InChapter 2, Dina Yoshimi presents an overview of the literature on Japanese pragmatics. The goal of this survey chapter is two-fold: (1) to highlight the cultural, theoretical, and methodological factors that have been central in shaping the current field of Japanese pragmatics, and (2) to illustrate how Japanese language pedagogy and curriculum development has come to be increasingly ordered by an empirically-grounded understanding of those communicative practices and interactional routines that organize the pragmatics of social interaction in Japanese. Yoshimi’s chapter serves as an introduction to the ten chapters that offer empirical investigations of pragmatic competence among learners of Japanese and present implications of the research findings for pragmatic teaching. The next ten chapters offer empirical investigations of pragmatic competence among learners of Japanese. Chapters 3 through 5 focus on traditional norms of politeness and stance in Japanese as indexed by honorifics and speech styles, and learners’ intentions of emulating or resisting those target pragmatic norms. In Chapter 3, Kazutoh Ishida reports on a longitudinal development of Japanese pragmatic markers of stance, with an instructional component added to the longitudinal design. He investigated the development of six beginner-level learners’ use of Japanese desu/masu and the plain forms that index one’s affective stance. The participants received awareness-raising sessions of stance markers and conversation sessions with Japanese native speakers over the period of two semesters. Analysis of interactions between learners and native speakers showed that some learners expanded the ways in which they expressed their stances with the two forms. Analysis of the reflection sheets, which learners filled out after each conversation session, revealed increased awareness of the native speakers’ use of the forms and contextual features relevant to the selection of the forms. The findings suggest that the pragmatic forms of stance are learnable even at the beginning level through interaction with native-speaker peers. In Chapter 4, Keiko Ikeda examines the learners’ use of honorific speech in emails and telephone conversations, particularly, how advanced L2 learners of Japanese make decisions about using honorific styles in specific contexts. The study involved 15 advanced-level learners of Japanese and 15 native speakers of Japanese. The participants first wrote an email to a native Japanese speaker of two different statuses: (1) an employee at a company at which the participant sought an internship; or (2) a professor in a department in which the participant desired to pursue graduate study. A telephone conversation followed, in which they further
- 34. Introduction 9 discussed theirinterests. The email and telephone conversation data were transcribed and analyzed for the proportion of honorific speech (e.g., exalted and humble styles) employed by the learners in both tasks. The findings revealed that the advanced learners did not make use of honorific forms as much as the native speakers did in the same context. Qualitative analyses revealed that the learners used a variety of linguistic resources in order to project deference and demeanor expected in the task situations. In Chapter 5, Noriko Ishihara and Elaine Tarone provide unique insight by challenging the commonly-held notion of politeness as pragmatic target and focusing on learner subjectivity in emulating and resisting the Japanese norms of politeness. Using the interpretive case study approach, the authors investigated the reason and meaning behind the pragmatic choices made by seven advanced learners of Japanese in a US university. Retrospective interviews and follow-up email correspondence identified instances where learners intentionally either accommodated to or resisted perceived L2 pragmatic norms. The learners largely converged toward L2 norms to emulate the target culture. However, on occasion they intentionally diverged from L2 norms to resist pragmatic norms, particularly in the use of higher-level honorifics and gendered language. Learners’ pragmatic decisions were guided by a subjectivity that had been incorporated into their life experiences and previous learning of Japanese in and outside the classroom. The findings suggest a need for greater sensitivity toward learner subjectivity in pragmatics-focused instruction: how pragmatics might be more aptly taught and evaluated with learner subjectivity in mind. The next three empirical papers feature speech acts of requests, compliments, and refusals. While these speech acts have been widely researched in the interlanguage pragmatics literature, each of the three studies adds a unique angle to the examination of speech acts. Chapter 6 by Yumiko Tateyama targets the speech act of request, focusing on the effect of instruction on the acquisition of request realization patterns. Students in four second-year Japanese classes in an American university participated in the study. Two classes served as an experimental group and the other two served as a control group. The control group received regular instruction that closely followed the textbook lesson on making a request. The experimental group received additional practice that involved consciousness-raising activities, oral communicative practice with native speakers of Japanese, and a video feedback session. Telephone message and role-play tasks measured the effect of instruction. There was a significant instructional effect in both measures. Although there was no
- 35. 10 Naoko Taguchi significantgroup difference, the experimental group made greater gains than the control group when the interlocutor was a teacher, which suggests that the treatment was effective in raising their awareness about pragmalinguistic forms that index politeness. The findings are suggestive of the positive effect of explicit instruction combined with communicative practice in the development of pragmatic competence. In Chapter 7, Takafumi Shimizu explores the influence of learning context on L2 pragmatic realizations of compliment responses. Participants were 48 learners of Japanese in Japan (JSL) and in the United States (JFL). Data collected employed an oral discourse completion test that consisted of eight compliment situations. The data from the two learner groups, as well as baseline data from 60 native speakers of Japanese (JJ) and American English (AE), was analyzed specifically for the frequency of three compliment response types: positive (acceptance), negative (rejection), and avoidance (deflection), frequency and order of semantic formulas, and characteristics of words/phrases used in the responses. Results revealed a notable contextual influence on compliment responses: while JFL used negative strategy (rejection) most often, JSL used avoidance strategy (deflection) most frequently, approximating the native speaker norm. Follow-up interviews revealed that JFL learners tended to reject compliments based on what they had learned from Japanese textbooks. The findings suggest that the acquisition of pragmatic knowledge is strongly constrained by contextual factors of different sorts: exposure to the target language input and instructional materials. In Chapter 8, Megumi Kawate-Mierzejewska focuses on the organization of refusal sequences in L2 Japanese. Different from the majority of previous studies, the methodology in this study is unique in that it examines naturally occurring request-refusal sequences in telephone conversations. Participants were 20 native speakers of Japanese (JJ) and 20 American learners of Japanese (AJ) at the advanced proficiency level. Forty separate telephone conversations (20 JJ-JJ and 20 JJ-AJ conversations; 10– 15 minutes each) were tape-recorded. In each conversation, the researcher asked participants to tape-record their telephone conversation with friends. When the participant refused the researcher’s request, their refusal strategies were analyzed sequentially. Two important findings were gleaned from the analysis. First, JJs used more formulaic refusal patterns than AJs. Secondly, there were gender differences in refusal realization strategies in both JJ-JJ and JJ-AJ interactions. For instance, more male than female speakers tried to persuade the requester to abandon the request. The
- 36. Introduction 11 findings suggestsome important areas of pragmatic instruction, including typical refusal sequences in Japanese and gender differences in refusal realizations. While the previous six empirical papers investigate pragmatic competence in production tasks (e.g., role plays, emails, telephone and face-to-face conversation), Chapters 9 and 10 examine the competence in comprehension tasks. In Chapter 9, Akiko Hagiwara investigates learners’ comprehension of non-literal meaning conveyed by conventionalized, routine formulaic expressions. Two groups participated: 60 native speakers of Japanese and 60 learners of intermediate Japanese in a U.S. university. They completed a written multiple-choice questionnaire (k = 12) that asked them to choose the most appropriate interpretation of the target literal and non-literal, formulaic utterances. The greatest differences were found in the interpretation of formulaic utterances, while the groups did not differ as much in the comprehension of literal utterances. The findings suggest that learners have difficulty in comprehending formulaic utterances that native speakers frequently use in daily communication, potentially due to the limited input and opportunities to observe native-speaker patterns in a foreign language environment. Naoko Taguchi’s cross-sectional study in Chapter 10 further explores comprehension of non-literal, indirect meaning. Different from Hagiwara’s study, Taguchi used a listening instrument to examine learners’ inferential ability to comprehend indirect opinions and indirect refusals. Eighty-five students of Japanese in the beginner–, intermediate–, and advanced–levels completed a listening test that measured their ability to comprehend three types of indirect meaning: indirect refusals and indirect opinions of two types (conventional and non-conventional). The conventional indirect opinion items included three pragmalinguistic devices of indirect expressions: indirect sentence endings, adverbs of reservation, and expressions of wondering. Each item had a short dialogue, followed by a multiple-choice question that tested learners’ comprehension. Results showed that indirect refusals were the easiest to comprehend for all levels. Advanced and intermediate-level learners scored significantly higher than the beginner-level learners. Follow-up interviews revealed sources of comprehension difficulties in indirect communication that can be addressed in a classroom. The last two chapters in the empirical collection deal with discourse features that have been commonly examined in the literature of Japanese pragmatics. Using Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL),
- 37. 12 Naoko Taguchi TakafumiUtashiro and Goh Kawai’s Chapter 11 reports on the effectiveness of instructional intervention in the learning of Receptive Tasks (RTs). Participants were 24 learners of Japanese from intermediate to advanced proficiency levels studying Japanese in Japan. They received computer-delivered instruction on different RTs over a period of two weeks. As part of the instruction, learners watched video clips of native speaker conversations, practiced the RTs that appeared in the conversations, and evaluated their use. The instruction was sequenced according to three distinct stages: self-paced, instructor-led, and interaction-based learning. Learning outcome was measured after each stage using receptive and productive tasks, as well as awareness tasks. Results showed that learners made significant gains in the receptive tasks at all stages. They also demonstrated significant improvement in the production tasks after the self-paced and teacher-led learning stages. Awareness of RTs also improved after the instruction, and the gain was retained at a delayed post-test given one week after the instruction. These findings suggest the importance of explicit instruction in the use and awareness of RTs and potential benefits of CALL for pragmatic learning. Chapter 12 by Tomomi Kakegawa is the last chapter in the empirical collection. It is an instructional intervention study that examines the effects of direct teaching on the longitudinal development of sentence final particles (i.e., SFPs). Innovative in this study is the use of computer mediated communication (CMC) as an instructional medium. The participants were 11 students enrolled in a third semester Japanese class in a U.S. university and 17 native speakers of Japanese from a Japanese college. Learners of Japanese exchanged emails with two native speakers weekly for a period of 12 weeks. The learners received two instructional interventions that focused on the use of SFPs, once in the sixth week and the other in the eighth week. The first intervention aimed at raising the learners’ awareness of Japanese native speakers’ use of the SFPs in their emails. The second intervention involved drawing learners’ attention to their own use and non-use of the SFPs. Comparisons of the data between the first and second five-week periods showed learners’ increase in frequency and range of the SFPs produced, and majority of them were used in a productive manner. The findings suggest that CMC combined with explicit instructions is effective in the development of the SFPs. Each of the ten empirical chapters introduced – whether descriptive, quasi-experimental, qualitative, or quantitative – focuses on different features of Japanese pragmatics and examines the ways in which learners
- 38. Introduction 13 use theirlinguistic capacities to achieve the pragmatic targets. What learners can and cannot do and how they approximate more acceptable patterns or fall short of the patterns revealed in each chapter help us understand the nature of pragmatic competence at a given stage, and guide us to foresee the challenges and opportunities that learners face in their development toward the full pragmatic competence. Several instructional studies included in the collection address whether or not instruction could boost the learning in a short period of time by empirically testing the effectiveness of direct teaching in pragmatic development. In Chapter 13, the final chapter in the volume, Junko Mori reviews these empirical studies and discusses their contributions to the understanding of L2 pragmatic competence and its development, as well as to the implications of pragmatic instruction and assessment. At the same time, the chapter reconsiders commonly held assumptions behind many of these cross- cultural or interlanguage pragmatic studies. Pragmatics-Specific-to-Japanese, an overarching framework, organizes empirical papers in this volume. However, such a framework begs the question of whether Japanese pragmatics can be reduced to the sets of linguistic systems of indexing social and interpersonal functions (e.g., honorifics, sentence-final particles), as well as other styles and behaviors associated with indirectness or politeness. The mainstream practice of pre- establishing a construct, eliciting and examining the construct through measurable tasks, and making inferences on the construct by comparing it to a group of native speakers or learners across levels often simplifies individual and situational factors inherent to the individual’s pragmatic performance. Mori’s chapter addresses these limitations of the reductionist approach to pragmatic research and invites readers to explore new possibilities in conceptualizing and studying pragmatic competence. To this end, Mori presents intriguing prompts for the readers: − What does it mean to become pragmatically competent in a second language? What accounts for individual and situational variations in behaviors of members of a speech community who are pragmatically competent? Given the recent trends of transnationalism, how can we distinguish ideological beliefs about members of a particular culture from actual behaviors of the members? − How can we examine pragmatic competence to make inferences on its development? Are there any important pragmatic norms and
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- 43. 18 Naoko Taguchi Yamashita,Sayoko 1996 Six Measures of JSL Pragmatics (Technical report #14). Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i at Manoa, Second Language Teaching and Curriculum Center. Yong, Richard 2000 Interactional competence: challenges for validity. Paper presented at the Language Testing Research Colloquium. Vancouver, Canada, March. Yong, Richard and Agnes He (eds.) 1998 Talking and Testing: Discourse Approaches of the Assessment of Oral Proficiency. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Yoshimi, Dina and Haidan Wang (eds.) 2007 Selected Papers from Pragmatics in CJK Classrooms: The State of the Art. University of Hawaii at Manoa, National Foreign Language Resource Center
- 44. From a! tozo: Japanese pragmatics and its contribution to JSL/JFL pedagogy Dina R. Yoshimi Abstract This chapter provides an overview of the literature on Japanese pragmatics with the goal of a) highlighting the theoretical, and methodological factors that have been central in shaping the current field of Japanese pragmatics, and b) illustrating how research on pragmatics in Japanese language pedagogy and curriculum development has come to be increasingly ordered by an empirically-grounded understanding of those communicative practices and interactional routines that organize the pragmatics of social interaction in Japanese. 1. Introduction1 Although pragmatics may be the new kid on the block in the field of Japanese foreign language (JFL) pedagogy, pragmatic phenomena are hardly new to the JFL classroom.2 Years before pragmatics had even been mentioned in conjunction with Japanese language pedagogy, the instruction and explanation of the pragmatic aspects of Japanese were salient components of JFL textbooks (e.g., Naganuma and Mori 1962; Jorden with Chaplin 1963). Within the first ten chapters of Naganuma and Mori’s (1962) introductory text, for example, there are discussions of polite language use (use of prefix o-, of kudasai and [doozo]~~-te kudasai, and of -san/sensei), resources for discourse cohesion (-te, ga), and variable functions of sentence-final particle ne, to mention but a few of the pragmatic aspects singled out for explanation. In sharp contrast to the highly systematic presentation of the structural and lexical components of the language that comprise the primary instructional focus of the grammar- based “Main Texts,”3 the presentation of these points appears to be opportunistic, and the explanations themselves are infused with an almost commonsensical attitude toward usage. Thus, while complete and accurate knowledge of lexis and grammar were clearly the primary goals of JFL
- 45. 20 Dina R.Yoshimi instruction in the 1960s and 1970s, the importance of the pragmatic aspects of the language were not overlooked, although their communicative functions may not have been fully understood by practitioners in the field of JFL pedagogy. Notably, a similar treatment of Japanese pragmatic resources is evident in many of the foundational scholarly works in Japanese linguistics from the 1960s and 1970s. Working within the various approaches to linguistic description and analysis of that era, scholars addressed such aspects of Japanese pragmatics as stance marking and speaker perspective (Akatsuka 1978; Kuroda 1973, 1979), honorific morphology and its role in the production of polite language (Martin 1975), discourse organization (Kindaichi 1957/1978), and Japanese deictic phenomena (Kuno 1973; Smith 1979), among others. As was consistent with the standard linguistic research methods of the time, anecdotal observations, or constructed examples with “imagined contexts of usage” derived from native speaker intuitions were, effectively, the sole source of data. These sentence-level examples were thought to be analyzable through introspection (often with the assistance of a native speaker informant), and the phenomenon identified through the research was then accounted for through the economical elegance of a linguistic generalization. Notably, the researcher’s orientation to the pragmatic features of a given linguistic resource often stemmed from the inability of a syntactically- grounded analysis to fully account for the functions and/or distributions of the given resource(s) in the data. It was through such problem-solving processes that many of the concepts commonly used to explicate Japanese pragmatic phenomena today were first introduced: “(Speaker) empathy” (Kuroda 1979; Lebra 1976; Smith 1979) and “speaker point of view“ (Kuno 1979), indirectness (Ueda 1974), obligatory attention to hierarchical social ordering in linguistic use (Nakane 1970; Martin 1975), etc. A range of pragmatic phenomena also caught the interest of researchers in the social sciences, who discussed a number of social aspects of Japanese pragmatics: The orientation to social hierarchy in everyday interaction (Nakane 1970), the role of empathy (omoiyari) in listener response behaviors (Lebra 1976: 39) and the pervasiveness of obligation and reciprocal dependence in Japanese interaction (Doi [1971]1973), among others (see especially the works in Condon and Saito 1974). Although neither the linguistic research nor the work in the social sciences was framed as research on pragmatics, the diversity of these pragmatics-relevant studies highlights both the ubiquity of these phenomena in Japanese language and social interaction, as
- 46. From a! tozo: Japanese pragmatics 21 well as researchers’ orientation to them as having an important role in the effective accomplishment of interpersonal communication in Japanese. In the discussion that follows, I will outline the path by which the field of Japanese pragmatics, and the closely aligned field of JFL pragmatics, emerged from these early endeavors to account for dimensions of Japanese language use that did not “fit” neatly into the dominant structuralist paradigm (nor into the emerging transformationalist paradigm) of the time. While initially, the very salience of these phenomena, and their tendency to resist being shoehorned into strict syntactic and/or semantic analyses gave rise to a number of ad hoc constructs – e.g., empathy, indirectness, speaker perspective –, by the latter half of the 1980s, these pragmatic phenomena and the ad-hoc constructs that had been proposed to account for them, had become the object of regular and concerted linguistic inquiry. Studies of strategic use of honorifics (Hori 1995; Tokunaga 1988) the marking of epistemic stance (Akatsuka 1990; Aoki 1986; Kamio 1979), (in)direct speech (Coulmas 1986), and the use of deictics (Kitagawa 1979; Tsutsui 1990), to name but a few, proliferated, and, increasingly, the term “pragmatics” was used, either as a categorical label for the phenomenon, or as a descriptor of the nature of it. These studies provided the groundwork for JFL pedagogy professionals who had long noticed that these same points posed challenges both for teachers, who struggled to provide adequate explanations of them, as well as for students, who struggled to make use of these linguistic resources in a pragmatically appropriate manner. Several exploratory studies of pragmatic interlanguage (Ishida 2006; Kamada 1990; Maynard 1985) formed a foundation upon which researchers of JFL pragmatics established their nascent field. Although the initial studies remained focused on sentence- level phenomena, and analyses of these phenomena relied as much on researcher intuition and anecdotal evidence as on examinations of naturally-occurring conversational usage, the studies demonstrated that the domain of JFL pragmatics constituted a rich and fruitful area for research on learner language development (i.e., of pragmatic competence) and a potentially fruitful site for research on effective JFL instruction. 2. The coming of age of Japanese discourse pragmatics research Complementary to this growing line of JFL pragmatic research, a second domain of JFL pragmatic inquiry has developed from an area of Japanese
- 47. 22 Dina R.Yoshimi pragmatics research that is grounded in a significantly different theoretical foundation and a distinct set of methodological practices. This second area, the domain of discourse pragmatic research, was enabled by developments in data collection capabilities in the 1970s and 1980s (i.e., technological advances in audio and video recording and playback) that gave researchers access to a more stable and complete record of everyday language use. These technological advances, coupled with conceptual breakthroughs in the analysis of pragmatic phenomena at the discourse level over the past two and a half decades, have enabled the growth of a highly prolific and now well-established field of Japanese (discourse) pragmatics. The first studies of Japanese discourse organization based on naturally occurring recorded mundane talk were conducted by John Hinds (Hinds 1976, 1978, 1979, 1982). Hinds, himself greatly influenced by the early work of conversation analysis, was interested in the organizational principles of extended speech, most specifically conversation.4 In his work, he championed the exploration of stretches of talk and writing “beyond the single sentence in isolation” (1979: 156) in an effort to identify patterns in discourse that corresponded both to its linear organization (turn-taking) and its hierarchical organization (as had been documented fairly clearly for narrative by the mid-1970s). In addition to arguing (Hinds 1979, 1982) for various aspects of Japanese conversational organization (i.e., the segment, the paragraph, the triplet), he also undertook to study ellipsis as a discourse level phenomenon in Japanese (Hinds 1980, 1981), a path that many other researchers would soon follow. His paper on Japanese conversational structures (1982) includes the first analyses of non-verbal concomitant actions in Japanese conversational exchange (using videotaped data), and the analysis of conversational overlap, which he found to occur in Japanese conversation in ways that were considerably more prolonged than had been argued to be possible by analysts of English (1982: 322–323). In discussing this latter finding, Hinds took up a line of argumentation (1982: 324) that would be repeated many times by other researchers throughout the 1980s and beyond: He proposed an alternate linguistic account to replace the privileging of Japanese cultural homogeneity as a basis for explicating Japanese discourse phenomena that differed from those found in other languages (most commonly English). Building on the groundwork of Hinds’ pioneering endeavors, pragmatics researchers of the 1980s expanded the boundaries of discourse pragmatics in a number of directions, highlighting, with each new discovery, the importance of a) examining naturally-occurring data beyond the sentence-level, and b) recognizing the central role that speaker
- 48. From a! tozo: Japanese pragmatics 23 subjectivity and speaker choice play in the variable use of linguistic resources. Inoue (1984) uses a range of news reports and news features (both spoken and written) to demonstrate that the two most commonly occurring clause conjoining morphemes in her data set, -te and the infinitival ending -i, are neither interchangeable, nor merely stylistic variants, except in a highly restricted set of instances (1984: 85). Her analysis reveals that the morpheme -te has an inherent dimension of speaker subjectivity to it, reflecting the speaker’s perspective regarding the dependence of the two clauses joined by -te. The infinitival ending, on the other hand, does not share this feature. 5 Addressing a far more well- established structuralist paradigm, Szatrowski (1987) takes up the question of the function of the tense-aspect forms -ru and -ta in conversational narratives. She frames her study with the following insightful comments: “The question addressed is an ecological one: ‘How do mechanisms like tense and aspect function in Japanese and why?’ By ‘ecological’ I mean the function of forms and how they interact with other components in their environment, i.e., the discourse” (Szatrowski 1987: 409–410). She finds that the forms under study are “implemented variably” by the speakers, with each form serving to enhance either ‘pastness’ or “narrative events,” thereby demonstrating the inadequacy of “morphological distinctions like non-past/past and noncomplete/complete” when the analysis of these resources is directed beyond the sentence level. Szatrowski closes with an observation that will be repeated by discourse pragmatics researchers in subsequent decades; after acknowledging the limitations of her re-analysis, she stands by her data, her methodology, and her analysis, stating, “…the more important question to ask is what strategies do people use to create and interpret their discourse.” In posing this question, she (and the researchers who echo her stance) rejects wholesale the deterministic approach to language use that characterized the dominant linguistic paradigm of the 1960s and 1970s. Even as this shift to naturally-occurring discourse as a more appropriate database for exploring what “real people” do with language was becoming the norm for many in the now-growing field of Japanese pragmatics, so too was this viewpoint being taken up by researchers and practitioners of JFL pedagogy as well. The drawbacks of the overemphasis on formal aspects of sentential grammar that had characterized the linguistic research of the preceding two decades were pointed out by a number of researchers (Maynard 1985; Jorden and Walton 1987; Burt 1991), with Maynard (1985: 217) noting that “the fundamental role of language, i.e., its function
- 49. 24 Dina R.Yoshimi as a means for communicative interaction” had been overshadowed by sentential grammar to the virtual exclusion of discourse structure, with the result being that “students of a foreign language who have learned how to construct individual grammatical sentences often encounter difficulties when combining sentences to create a meanful [sic] cohesive discourse” (1985: 218). Producing these comments in the context of her contrastive analytic study of discourse organizational principles, Maynard went on to propose that the findings of such a study and others like it (similarly focused on contrastive analysis of discourse cohesion) could have immediate relevance for JFL classroom learning, making it possible “to incorporate the principles of text and discourse strategies into our daily teaching” (1985: 228). While Maynard (1985) does not make any explicit recommendations on how this incorporation of findings from the literature on discourse pragmatic research might best be accomplished, Jorden and Walton (1987) in their bold proposal for the instruction of “truly foreign languages” (such as Japanese and Chinese) outline a set of “best practices” for classroom foreign language instruction that are designed specifically to address the special instructional challenges that arise when the learners’ base language and their target language of study are markedly different, including in the domain of pragmatics. Decrying instructional materials that make use of outdated linguistic explanations, direct translations of English that ignore target language usage, and instructional dialogs that lack pragmatic and sociolinguistic information, Jorden and Walton (1987) propose that the basic unit of learning “must always be a sample discourse” if the student is to learn how target-natives construct conversations in precisely defined situations. There is no way for students to predict transition words, intonations, deletions, and the like without a target-native model” (1987: 123). Yet they do not assume that providing the learner with such a model will resolve all learning challenges. Rather, they propose the additional pedagogical innovation of pairing a “linguistically sophisticated target- native” who will be responsible for producing “truly authentic language samples” with a “base-native linguist, who shares the students’ mind-set and who knows through personal experience what it means to be a foreigner in the target culture, [and who] plays a vital role in analyzing and explaining, and in making decisions related to situations, pacing, ordering, and levels of difficulty.” This proposal not only predates the now familiar debate on the relative merits of implicit vs. explicit instruction of pragmatics (opting instead for a combination of the two), but also
- 50. From a! tozo: Japanese pragmatics 25 recognizes the inherently inter-linguistic nature of JFL pragmatics learning well before “interlanguage pragmatics” had become an established topic in the field of second language studies. The first volume of Jorden with Noda’s (1987) textbook, Japanese: The Spoken Language, which strictly adhered to the principles outlined in Jorden and Walton (1987), was published in the same year, and the publication of the three-volume set was complete by 1990. In a 44-page review of the set, Quinn (1991: 264) praised the work for setting “new standards for foreign language pedagogy“ with its breadth and depth of attention to “modeled, guided use of the language, in culturally coherent contexts” (1991: 249). Yet, at the same time, the pedagogical approach proposed in conjunction with the work – an extensive and unalterable regimen of drills and practice activities designed not only to preclude the production of interlanguage errors, but also to provide learners with a thorough grounding in the grammar, pragmatics, and culture of Japanese – proved to be a breaking point, with many finding the time required for complete and proper coverage of the materials to be too overburdening (Quinn 1991: 263; Makino 1991: 223). Thus, while the book remained a common fixture on the shelves of many linguists owing to its thorough coverage and complete explanations of Japanese language structure and pragmatic usage, its thoroughly inflexible and time-consuming approach to JFL instruction ultimately undercut its potential for effecting precisely the type of dramatic change in the instruction of JFL pragmatics that many JFL researchers and practitioners had been calling for. The 1980s were clearly the watershed decade for both Japanese pragmatics and JFL pedagogy. The latter half of that decade produced both the first book length treatment of the pragmatics of Japanese conversation (Maynard 1989), and the first book length guide for daily language use for JFL learners (Mizutani and Mizutani 1987). Maynard’s work, framed as a study of “self-contextualization” (i.e., what strategies do people use to create a discourse role and an interactional stance for themselves in discourse) makes use of a wide range of data that includes both constructed examples and transcriptions of recordings of naturally occurring talk. Moreover, she continues to push into new domains of pragmatic phenomena, here taking up, among other interactional practices, the now- familiar topic of turn-taking in Japanese conversational interaction (cf. Tanaka 1999 and elsewhere). Like Maynard’s (1989) volume, Mizutani and Mizutani’s (1987) guide – which contains explanations of everyday Japanese speaking practices
- 51. 26 Dina R.Yoshimi associated with verbal politeness, as well as the underlying Japanese cultural attitudes toward such politeness phenomena – may also be taken as an important indicator of a new era in JFL pragmatics. First, manuals on proper use of polite language had long been the domain of native speakers, while foreigners, who, at least from an ideological perspective, were not expected to demonstrate an equivalent level of pragmatic competence in the Japanese social world (Kubota 2008), had not heretofore been burdened with similar concerns. Indeed, a version of Japanese language (nihongo) for the instruction of foreigners had been developed as part of national language policy precisely because foreigners were not culturally obligated to speak the language (kokugo) as native Japanese did (Tai 2003). Yet, in the 1980s, as Japan’s economy boomed and the number of learners of Japanese expanded exponentially, the perception of Japanese as an exotic language spoken by a few academic types was overtaken by the expectation that any foreigner might learn Japanese as a “practical skill with economic utility” (Coulmas 1989: 129). It is within this cultural and historical context that the publication of Mizutani and Mizutani’s (1987) manual on politeness can be viewed as marking the beginning of an upward shift in the expectations for pragmatic competence (especially polite use of language) for JFL learners. At the same time, in introducing their volume, the implicit nature of this shift is made explicit by the authors who state that they “believe that foreigners can understand any subtle point whatever in Japanese and can use it if they so desire; we [the authors] do not believe in a “gaijin Japanese” different from the Japanese of native speakers” (Mizutani and Mizutani 1987: 3). 3. A fork in the road: Japanese pragmatics and JFL pragmatics part company As Japanese pragmatics entered the 1990s, it remained a field energized by the methodological and theoretical shifts that had taken place in the preceding decade, and also ready to push forward into new domains of inquiry. One notable trend was a shift away from a focus on the speaker (e.g., speaker subjectivity, speaker perspective), and toward a broader interest in the joint actions – such as “finishing each other’s sentences” (Hayashi and Mori 1998; Ono and Yoshida 1996) –, and social activities accomplished by two or more participants engaged in everyday social interaction, such as floor management in multi-party interaction (Hayashi
- 52. From a! tozo: Japanese pragmatics 27 1996) and negotiating (dis)agreement (Mori 1999). To the tradition of research on discourse cohesion through the study of ellipsis and clause- conjoining was added a new perspective: Research on the use of discourse connectives such as datte and dakara, which were examined from a variety of theoretical perspectives (e.g., Discourse Modality in Maynard 1993; speech act theory in Kubo 1999; Conversation Analysis in Mori 1995). Over the past ten years, research in Japanese pragmatics has broken new ground by challenging the tenability of many longstanding analyses of grammatical morphemes or syntactic patterns as having functions restricted by sentence level grammar (cf. Ono, Thompson, and Suzuki [2000] for a proposal that the distribution of the so-called grammatical morpheme ga, long referred to as a subject marker, is actually conditioned by discourse- pragmatic features of interaction; Takagi’s [2002] comprehensive study of the “multilayered resources” available to conversational participants in conjunction with the interpretation of unexpressed referents in spoken discourse, i.e., ellipsis; and Lee and Yonezawa’s [2008] pragmatic account of overt expression of subject pronouns in casual conversations and other slightly formal conversational interactions). In contrast, research in JFL pragmatics took a decidedly different direction at this point in its history. While researchers and practitioners now had a much clearer idea of what they needed to teach (cf. the increased presence and elaboration of cultural notes and usage notes in the textbooks of this decade such as Nakama and Yookoso!), there seemed to be considerable uncertainty regarding how best to teach it. With the communicative revolution sputtering, and the comprehensive approach to “teaching all of it” (i.e., Jorden with Noda 1987) deemed too burdensome for learners in most college-level programs to handle, it is perhaps not surprising that much of JFL research focused on a search for effective instructional approaches to pragmatics. Following work conducted by House (1996), Tateyama et al. (1997) and Tateyama (2001, 2007, 2009) demonstrated that the development of pragmatic competence may be facilitated by explicit instruction of pragmatic routines combined with communicative practice and feedback from the teacher. Similarly, Yoshimi (2001) found that intermediate learners who received explicit instruction on the effective use of discourse markers in the production of extended tellings, showed considerable improvement in the appropriateness of their use of discourse markers as well as in the effectiveness of organizing the oral production of extended tellings.
- 53. 28 Dina R.Yoshimi Yet, while these studies were able to demonstrate that learners who received explicit instruction were able to outperform their implicitly instructed and/or uninstructed peers under experimental conditions, a set of studies conducted by researchers working within the paradigm of language socialization produced evidence that a considerable amount of pragmatic learning was occurring even in contexts where learners were not being provided with explicit instruction. In a special issue of the Journal of Pragmatics, several researchers applied the framework of language socialization (Schieffelin and Ochs 1986) to their L2 data (Kanagy 1999; Ohta 1999; Yoshimi 1999) in an effort to develop a clearer understanding of the ways in which learner pragmatic development progresses. Across a range of age groups and learning contexts, each demonstrated that pragmatic development may proceed unassisted through learners’ direct participation and/or peripheral participation in regular communicative routines (Kanagy 1999, Ohta 1999), although there is no guarantee that this development will not be negatively impacted by transfer of the learner’s L1 pragmatic preferences (Yoshimi 1999). In addition to providing the opportunity for participation in pragmatic routines, JFL classrooms have also been shown to be rich settings for the implicit socialization of preferred practices and values of the target culture (Falsgraf and Majors 1995). 4. The coming of age of JFL pragmatics research and JFL pragmatics focused pedagogy More than twenty years after Maynard’s (1985) call for researchers to take up the insights of discourse-level pragmatics research, and with a steady chorus of researchers joining in since that time (Burt 1991; Hayashi 1996; Mori 2005, 2006; Yoshimi 2007), it appears that the field of JFL pragmatics has finally come of age: The enhanced understandings of Japanese pragmatic phenomena that have accrued over the past four decades have begun to inform, in significant ways, our understanding of the relationship between the JFL classroom environment, the instructional activities carried out and materials used therein, and the pragmatic development of the JFL learner. Taking a critical approach to the teaching of “Japanese culture,” Tai (2003) proposes that teachers move away from fixed, ideological representations of Japanese language and culture and strive to explore “the
- 54. From a! tozo: Japanese pragmatics 29 dynamics and multiplicity of language phenomena,” starting with “their own familiar speech habits” (2003: 22), and adding in other varieties available from the media or the internet. Kubota (2003) also calls for a re- examination of JFL classroom practices and instructional materials, demonstrating the pernicious effects of instructional materials that present culture as a “simplistic binary opposition of US vs. THEM” (2003: 85), and proposing instructional strategies for avoiding the reinforcement of Nihonjinron-based perspectives that make “a causal link between a cultural practice and cultural perspectives appear logical and plausible” (2003: 83). Still others take up critical stances toward the instruction of gendered language and honorific expressions (Ohara, Saft, and Crookes 2001; Matsumoto and Okamoto 2003; Okamoto and Siegal 2003). These studies address areas of classroom language instruction that have been, and to a considerable extent remain, mired in facile, stereotypical understandings of the relationship between language use and social dimensions of language users and/or communicative settings. From the perspective of Japanese pragmatics, the power of these proposals is their thorough grounding in microanalytic studies of naturally-occurring language from a broad range of users and contexts of usage. Yet, from a JFL pedagogical/pragmatics perspective, the strength of these proposals lies in their validation of the communicative practices and everyday usage of all speakers of Japanese, and the accessibility of this “expertise” through reflective pedagogical activities. More recently, there have been calls for the updating of instructional materials in ways that reflect our state-of-the-art understanding of Japanese language usage at the discourse level. Jones and Ono (2005) note the increased naturalness in textbook dialogs over the past 30 years that has been achieved through more authentic use of subject ellipsis, contracted forms, and sentence-final particles, but bemoan the fact that these dialogues still often fail to reflect “how Japanese is actually used” (2005: 242), providing a list of features that are present in everyday language use, but that are not yet represented in textbook dialogs, and focusing especially on the highly collaborative nature of everyday talk. They conclude by encouraging pedagogical practitioners to provide models of natural discourse, either through the editing and/or development of model dialogs, or through the incorporation of activities that give learners access to audio or video recordings of such models. The ready availability of two such resources – Colligan-Taylor’s (2007) volume of unscripted interviews on topics pertaining to Japanese society
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- 56. Ma io nonposso indugiarmi a discorrere su ogni scrittore che mi avvenga di nominare in questa rapida corsa. Debbo limitarmi a fuggevoli accenni, rimandando a miglior tempo uno studio compiuto e un'antologia degli umoristi italiani, che qui, dato il mio compito, sarebbe fuor di luogo. Basterà porre in vista alcuni pochi nomi; e due ne abbiamo già citati di sommi, e un terzo di più modesto scrittore, che fu di popolo e artigiano, uso, come disse egli stesso «tutto il giorno a combattere con la forbice e con l'ago: cose che se bene sono strumenti da donne, e le muse son donne, non si legge però ch'elle fussino mai adoperate da loro»: Giambattista Gelli, voglio dire, che nei giardini del Ruccellai si pascolò di filosofia e diede fuori quella Circe e quei Capricci di Giusto Bottajo, che — ripeto — chi sa che capolavori d'umorismo sembrerebbero, se scritti in inglese, da scrittore inglese» Ma sul serio, se son considerati umoristi in Inghilterra il Congreve, lo Steele, il Prior, il Gay, non troveremo noi nella letteratura nostra da contrapporre altri nomi di scrittori, che noi, per conto nostro, non ci siamo mai sognati di chiamare umoristi, anche del settecento, e anche di due e di tre secoli innanzi? Ma quanti bizzarri a gaj ingegni tra quei bajoni nostri del Cinquecento! E il Cellini? Sul serio, se ci vediamo porre innanzi The Dunciade del Pope, non abbiamo da prendere a piene mani, per seppellirla, tutta una letteratura, di cui sogliamo vergognarci, a cominciar dai Mattaccini del Caro? Mancassero guerre d'inchiostro tra i letterati nostri d'ogni tempo, giù giù dai sonetti di Cecco Angiolieri contro Dante, all'Atlantide di Mario Rapisardi! Riso anche questo, sicuro, gajezza mala, umore, cioè fiele, collera fredda e secca, come la chiama Brunetto Latini, o malinconia nel senso originario della parola: la malinconia appunto dello Swift libellista. Penso al Franco, all'Aretino e, più qua, a quel terribile monsignor Lodovico Sergardi. A questi soltanto? Ma a ben più d'uno è forza ch'io riguardi, Il qual mi grida e di lontano accenna E priega ch'io nol lasci nella penna,
- 57. vedendo con quantalarghezza gli altri imbarchino scrittori su questo Narrenschiff dell'umorismo! Ma sì, perchè no? anche tu, Ortensio Lando, se pur volontariamente non pazzeggi come Bruto per aver diritto di vivere e di parlare con libertà, come disse Carlo Tenca; monta anche tu, autore dei Paradossi e del Commentario delle cose mostruose d'Italia e d'altri luoghi, tu che, non foss'altro, avesti il coraggio di dare ai tuoi dì dell'animalaccio ad Aristotile. Io, per me, ti lascerei a terra con tutti gli altri, a terra col Doni, a terra col Boccalini, Tacito proconsolo nell'isola di Lesbo, a terra col Dotti, a terra con tanti prima e dopo di te, il Caporali e il Lippi e il Passeroni; ma non vorrei essere io solo così rigoroso, massime quando vedo dalla barca uno che ha il diritto di starvi, incontestabile, Lorenzo Sterne, far cenni e invitar quell'ultimo dei nostri che ho nominati, a montarvi. E Alessandro Tassoni? si deve lasciare a terra anche lui? Nelle recenti feste in suo onore, parecchi han voluto veder stoffa d'umorista vero in questo acuto e acerbo derisore, anzi disprezzatore del suo tempo. Se fosse inglese o tedesco, sarebbe già da un pezzo nella barca anche lui e degno di starvi. a giudizio de' savi universale. Siamo sempre lì: in che senso si deve intendere l'umorismo? L'Arcoleo, su la fine della sua seconda conferenza, dichiara di non essere incline a quella critica che, rispetto a forme letterarie, dispensa facilmente scomuniche e ostracismi; e dice che sono molto complesse le ragioni per le quali in Italia ebbe poca vita la forma umoristica, e che egli non vuol profanare quest'argomento che merita studio speciale. Quali sieno queste ragioni molto complesse, che al lume degli stessi esempii recati dall'Arcoleo appajono qua e là contraddittorie, abbiamo già veduto: da noi non c'è spirito d'osservazione nè intimità di stile, siamo pedanti e accademici, siamo scettici e indifferenti, non aspiriamo a nulla. Contro queste accuse, noi abbiamo citato parecchi nomi, che mai, neppure in un lampo, sono sorti in mente all'Arcoleo. Una sola volta, parlando del Heine in
- 58. fin di vita,che ride del suo dolore, pensa, per combinazione, al Leopardi che si sentiva anche lui «un tronco che pena e vive» e al Brighenti scriveva: «Io sto qui deriso, sputacchiato, preso a calci da tutti, di maniera che se vi penso mi fa raccapricciare. Tuttavia mi avvezzo a ridere e ci riesco». Sì, ma «restò lirico», osserva, «l'educazione classica non gli permise di essere umorista!» Ma scrisse anche certi dialoghi se non c'inganniamo, e certe altre prosette... Restò lirico anche lì? L'educazione classica... Ma almeno la tendenza romantica avrà permesso al Manzoni di essere umorista? Che! Il suo don Abbondio «non aspira a nulla, litiga tra il dovere e la paura; è ridicolo senz'altro». Non è questo un modo abbastanza spiccio di giudicare e mandare? Ma questo modo, veramente, tiene l'Arcoleo dal principio alla fine delle due conferenze: l'argomento è trattato così, a sprazzi, per sentenze inappellabili. Umorismo: fuoco d'artifizio di scoppiettanti definizioni; poi, prima fase: dubbio e scetticismo — «ridere del proprio pensiero» — Amleto; seconda fase, lotta e adattamento — «ridere del proprio dolore» — Don Giovanni. E tra gli umoristi della prima fase son citati due francesi, Rabelais e Montaigne, e due inglesi, Swift e Sterne; tra gli umoristi della seconda, due tedeschi, Richter e Heine, tre inglesi, Carlyle, Dickens, Thackeray e poi... Marco Twain. Come si vede, nessun italiano. E dire che arriviamo fino a Marco Twain! L'Arcoleo conclude così: «Lo spirito comico rimase avviluppato nell'embrione della commedia dell'arte o nella poesia dialettale; e molto e ricco sviluppo ebbero invece e in poesia e in prosa, in poemi, novelle, romanzi e saggi, l'ironia e la satira. Basta confondere con queste forme l'humour, perchè n'esca giudizio opposto al mio, o perchè io sembri esagerato e ingiusto. Non intendo parlare di tentativi o abbozzi; si trovano facilmente in ogni storia artistica e di ogni forma: ma io non so vedere fra noi una letteratura umoristica e all'uopo non avrei che a fare un paragone tra l'Ariosto e Cervantes». Questo paragone l'abbiamo fatto noi, e con un giudizio non opposto a quello ch'egli avrebbe dato, se avesse fatto il paragone. Tra parentesi però, Cervantes — come Rabelais, come Montaigne — è un latino; e non crediamo che la Riforma propriamente in Spagna...
- 59. Lasciamo andare! Veniamoin Italia. Noi non vogliamo affatto confondere lo spirito comico, l'ironia, la satira con l'umorismo: tutt'altro! Ma non si deve neanche confondere l'umorismo vero e proprio con l'humour inglese, cioè con quel tipico modo di ridere o umore che, come tutti gli altri popoli, hanno anche gl'Inglesi. Non si pretenderà, che gl'italiani o i Francesi abbiano l'humour inglese; come non si può pretendere che gl'Inglesi ridano a modo nostro o facciano dello spirito come i Francesi. L'avranno magari fatto, qualche volta; ma ciò non vuol dire. L'umorismo vero e proprio è un'altra cosa, ed è anche per gl'inglesi un'eccentricità di stile. Basta confondere l'una cosa e l'altra — diciamo anche noi a nostra volta — perchè si venga a riconoscere una letteratura umoristica a un popolo e a negarla a un altro. Ma una letteratura umoristica si può avere a questo solo patto, cioè di far questa confusione; e allora ogni popolo avrà la sua, assommando tutte le opere in cui questo tipico umore si esprime nei più bizzarri modi; e noi potremmo cominciar la nostra, ad esempio, con Cecco Angiolieri, come gl'Inglesi la cominciano col Chaucer, e non direi che la comincino bene, non per il valore del poeta, ma perchè egli mostra di aver mescolato alla bevanda nazionale un po' del vino che si vendemmia nel paese del sole. Altrimenti, una letteratura umoristica vera e propria non è possibile, presso nessun popolo: si possono avere umoristi, cioè pochi e rari scrittori in cui per natural disposizione avviene quel complicato e speciosissimo processo psicologico che si chiama umorismo. Quanti ne cita l'Arcoleo? Certamente, l'umorismo nasce da uno speciale stato d'animo, che può, più o meno, diffondersi. Quando un'espressione d'arte riesce a conquistare l'attenzione del pubblico, questo si dà subito a pensare e a parlare e a scrivere secondo le impressioni che ne ha ricevuto; di modo che quella espressione, sorta dapprima dalla particolare intuizione d'uno scrittore, penetrata rapidamente nel pubblico, è poi da questo variamente trasformata e diretta. Così avvenne per il romanticismo, così per il naturalismo: diventarono le idee del tempo, quasi un'atmosfera ideale; e molti fecero per moda i romantici o i naturalisti, come molti per moda fecero gli umoristi in Inghilterra nel
- 60. sec. XVIII, emolti furon degli umidi nel Cinquecento in Italia, e degli arcadi nel settecento. Uno stato d'animo si può creare in noi e divenir coerente o rimaner fittizio, secondo che risponda o no alla speciale fisionomia dell'organismo psichico. Ma poi le idee del tempo mutano, cangia la moda, i pòmpili seguaci si mettono appresso ad altre navi. Chi resta? Restano quei pochi, da contar su le dita, quei pochi che ebbero, primi, l'intuizione straordinaria, o in cui quello speciale stato d'animo divenne così coerente, che poteron creare un'opera organica, resistente al tempo e alla moda. Sul serio poi l'Arcoleo crede che nella nostra letteratura dialettale non ci sia altro che spirito comico? Egli è siciliano, e certamente ha letto il Meli, e sa quanto sia ingiusto il giudizio di arcadia superiore dato della poesia di lui, che non fu sonata soltanto su la zampogna pastorale, ma ebbe anche tutte le corde della lira e si espresse in tutte le forme. Non c'è vero e proprio umorismo in tanta parte della poesia del Meli? Ma basterebbe citar soltanto La cutuliata per dimostrarlo! Tic tic... chi fu? Cutuliata. E non c'è umorismo, vero e proprio umorismo, in tanti e tanti sonetti del Belli? E senza parlare delle figure del Maggi, il Giovannin Bongè, il Marchionn di gamb avert di Carlo Porta non son due capolavori d'umorismo? E, poichè si parla di tipi rimasti imperituri, il Monsù Travet del Bersezio, il Nobilomo Vidal del Gallina? E un altro scrittore dialettale abbiamo, finora quasi del tutto ignoto, grandissimo: umorista vero, se mai ce ne fu, e — a farlo apposta — meridionalissimo, di Reggio Calabria: Giovanni Merlino, rivelato or son parecchi anni, in una conferenza[47] da Giuseppe Mantica, suo conterraneo, che sarebbe stato anche lui un forte scrittore umorista se, nel breve corso della sua esistenza, la politica non lo avesse troppo presto distratto dalle lettere. Scrisse il Merlino i suoi libri per 55 lettori, che nomina uno per uno e divide in quattro categorie, imponendo a ciascuna di esse alcuni speciali obblighi in ricompensa del piacere loro procurato. Uno de' suoi volumi, ancora tutti inediti, è
- 61. detto: Miscellanea divarie cose sconnesse e piacevoli, «fatta per coloro che, avendo poco cervello, vogliono istruirsi sul modo più acconcio per perderlo interamente»; gli altri sono Memorie utili ed inutili ai posteri, ossia la vita di Giovanni Merlino del quondam Antonio di Reggio, principiata a 27 decembre 1789 e proseguita fino al 1850, composta di sette volumi. Vorrei poter citare per disteso il lungo Dialogo alla calabrese tra Domine Dio e Giovanni Merlino o il Conto con Domine Dio per dimostrare che umorista fosse il Merlino. Nell'attesa che gli eredi lo rendano a tutti noto pubblicando i volumi, rimando alla pubblicazione che il Mantica fece di questi due impareggiabili Dialoghi, con la traduzione a fronte. Questo, per la letteratura dialettale. Non scopre poi sul serio altro che ironia e satira l'Arcoleo negli scrittori italiani? Io penso a un certo Socrate immaginario d'un certo abbate del settecento; penso al Didimo chierico del Foscolo: ad alcune volate in prosa del Baretti; penso ai Promessi Sposi del Manzoni, tutto infuso di genuino umorismo;[48] penso al Sant'Ambrogio del Giusti, vera poesia umoristica, unica forse tra le tante satiriche o sentimentali; penso a quei certi dialoghi e a quelle certe prosette del Leopardi; penso all'Asino e al Buco nel muro del Guerrazzi; penso al Fanfulla del D'Azeglio; penso a Carlo Bini; penso a quella tal cucina nel castello di Fratta delle Confessioni d'un ottuagenario del Nievo; penso a Camillo De Meis, al Revere; e, poichè l'Arcoleo arriva fino a Marco Twain, penso al Re umorista, al Demonio dello stile, all'Altalena delle antipatie, al Pietro e Paola, a Scaricalasino, all'Illustrissimo del Cantoni; al Demetrio Pianelli del De Marchi; penso ai poeti della scapigliatura lombarda e a tante note di schietto e profondo umorismo nelle liriche del Carducci e del Graf; penso ai tanti personaggi umoristici che popolano i romanzi e le novelle del Fogazzaro, del Farina, del Capuana, del Fucini, e anche ad alcune opere di più giovani scrittori, da Luigi Antonio Villari all'Albertazzi, al Panzini... ed ecco, la Lanterna di Diogene di quest'ultimo vorrei porre in una mano all'Arcoleo e nell'altra la candela del Candelaio del Bruno: son sicuro che parecchi scrittori umoristi scoprirebbe nella letteratura italiana antica e nuova.
- 62.
- 63. Essenza, caratteri emateria dell'umorismo I Che cosa è l'umorismo? Se volessimo tener conto di tutte le risposte che si son date a questa domanda, di tutte le definizioni che autori e critici han tentato, potremmo riempire parecchie e parecchie pagine, e probabilmente alla fine, confusi tra tanti pareri e dispareri, non riusciremmo ad altro che a ripetere la domanda: — Ma, in somma, che cos'è l'umorismo? Abbiamo già detto che tutti coloro, i quali, o di proposito o per incidenza, ne han parlato, in una cosa sola si accordano, nel dichiarare che è difficilissimo dire che cosa sia veramente, perchè esso ha infinite varietà e tante caratteristiche che, a volerlo descrivere in generale, si rischia sempre di dimenticarne qualcuna. Questo è vero; ma è vero altresì che da un pezzo ormai avrebbe dovuto capirsi che partire da queste caratteristiche non è la via migliore per arrivare a intendere la vera essenza dell'umorismo, poichè sempre avviene che una se ne assuma per fondamentale, quella che si è riscontrata comune a parecchie opere o a parecchi scrittori studiati con predilezione; di modo che tante definizioni si vengono infine ad avere dell'umorismo, quante sono le caratteristiche riscontrate, e tutte naturalmente hanno una parte di vero, e nessuna è la vera. Certamente, dalla somma di tutte queste varie caratteristiche e delle conseguenti definizioni si può arrivare a comprendere, così, in generale, che cosa sia l'umorismo; ma se ne avrà sempre una
- 64. conoscenza sommaria edesteriore, appunto perchè fondata su queste sommarie ed esteriori determinazioni. La caratteristica, ad esempio, di quella tale peculiar bonarietà o benevola indulgenza che scoprono alcuni nell'umorismo, già definito del Richter «malinconia d'un animo superiore che giunge a divertirsi finanche di ciò che lo rattrista»,[49] quel «tranquillo, giocondo e riflesso sguardo su le cose», quel «modo d'accogliere gli spettacoli divertenti, che sembra, nella sua moderazione, soddisfare il senso del ridicolo e domandar perdono di ciò che v'è di poco delicato in tal compiacimento», quella tale «espansione degli spiriti dall'interno all'esterno incontrata e ritardata dalla corrente contraria d'una specie di benevolenza pensosa», di cui parla il Sully nel suo Essai sur le rire, [50] non si trovano in tutti gli umoristi. Alcuni di questi tratti, che al critico francese, e non a lui soltanto, pajono principali dell'umorismo, si troveranno in alcuni, in altri no; e in certuni anzi si troverà il contrario, come ad esempio nello Swift, che è malinconico nel senso originario della parola, cioè pieno di fiele; e del resto noi vedremo un po' più innanzi, parlando del don Abbondio del Manzoni, a che cosa in fondo si riduca quella peculiar bonarietà o simpatica indulgenza. Al contrario, quella «acre disposizione a scoprire ed esprimere il ridicolo del serio e il serio del ridicolo umano», di cui parla il Bonghi, calzerà allo Swift e a umoristi al pari di lui beffardi e mordaci; non calzerà ad altri; nè del resto, come osserva il Lipps, opponendosi alla teoria del Lazzarus, che considera anch'esso l'umorismo soltanto come una disposizione d'animo, questo modo di considerarlo è compiuto. Nè compiuto sarà quello del Hegel che lo dice «attitudine speciale d'intelletto e di animo onde l'artista si pone lui stesso al posto delle cose», definizione che, a non porsi bene a guardare da quel solo lato da cui l'Hegel lo guarda, ha tutta l'aria d'un rebus. Caratteristiche più comuni, e però più generalmente osservate, sono la «contradizione» fondamentale, a cui si suol dare per causa principale il disaccordo che il sentimento e la meditazione scoprono o fra la vita reale e l'ideale umano o fra le nostre aspirazioni e le nostre debolezze e miserie, e per principale effetto quella tal
- 65. perplessità tra ilpianto e il riso; poi lo scetticismo, di cui si colora ogni osservazione, ogni pittura umoristica, e in fine il suo procedere minuziosamente e anche maliziosamente analitico. Dalla somma, ripeto, di tutte queste caratteristiche e conseguenti definizioni si può arrivare a comprendere, così, in generale, che cosa sia l'umorismo, ma nessuno negherà che non ne risulti una conoscenza troppo sommaria. Che se accanto ad alcune determinazioni affatto incompiute, come abbiamo veduto, altre ve ne sono indubbiamente più comuni, l'intima ragione di esse non è poi veduta affatto con precisione nè spiegata. Rinunzieremo noi a vederla con precisione e a spiegarla, accettando l'opinione di Benedetto Croce che nel Journal of comparative Literature (fasc. III, 1903) dichiarò indefinibile l'umorismo come tutti gli stati psicologici, e nel libro dell'Estetica lo annoverò tra i tanti concetti dell'estetica del simpatico? «L'indagine dei filosofi — egli dice — si è a lungo travagliata intorno a questi fatti, e specialmente intorno ad alcuni di essi, come, in prima linea, il comico, e poi il sublime, il tragico, l'umoristico e il grazioso. Ma bisogna evitar l'errore di considerarli come sentimenti speciali, note del sentimento, ammettendo così delle distinzioni e classi di sentimenti, laddove il sentimento organico per sè stesso non può dar luogo a classi; e bisogna chiarire in che senso possano dirsi fatti misti. Essi dan luogo a concetti complessi, ossia di complessi di fatti, nei quali entrano sentimenti organici di piacere e dispiacere (o anche sentimenti spirituali-organici), e date circostanze esterne che forniscono a quei sentimenti meramente organici o spirituali-organici un determinato contenuto. Il modo di definizione di questi concetti è il genetico: Posto l'organismo nella situazione a, sopravvenendo la circostanza b, si ha il fatto c. Questo e simili processi non hanno col fatto estetico nessun contatto: salvo quello generale che tutti essi, in quanto costituiscono la materia o la realtà, possono essere rappresentati dall'arte; e l'altro, accidentale, che in questi processi entrino talvolta dei fatti estetici, come nel caso dell'impressione di sublime che può produrre l'opera di un artista titano, di un Dante o di uno Shakespeare, o di quella comica del conato di un imbrattatele o di
- 66. un imbrattacarte. Anchein questi casi il processo è estrinseco al fatto estetico: al quale non si lega se non il sentimento del piacere e dispiacere, del valore e disvalore estetico, del bello e del brutto». Innanzi tutto, perchè sono indefinibili gli stati psicologici? Saranno forse indefinibili per un filosofo, ma l'artista, in fondo, non fa altro che definire e rappresentare stati psicologici. E poi se l'umorismo è un processo o un fatto che dà luogo a concetti complessi, ossia di complessi di fatti, come diventa poi esso un concetto? Concetto sarà quello a cui l'umorismo dà luogo, non l'umorismo. Certamente se per fatto estetico deve intendersi quel che intende il Croce, tutto diviene estrinseco ad esso, non che questo processo. Ma noi abbiamo dimostrato altrove e anche nel corso di questo lavoro, che il fatto estetico non è nè può essere quel che il Croce intende. E, del resto, che significa la concessione che «questo e simili processi non hanno col fatto estetico nessun contatto, salvo quello generale che tutti essi, in quanto costituiscono la materia o la realtà possono essere rappresentati dall'arte?». L'arte può rappresentare questo processo che dà luogo al concetto di umorismo. Ora, come potrò io, critico, rendermi conto di questa rappresentazione artistica, se non mi rendo conto del processo da cui risulta? E in che consisterebbe allora la critica estetica? «Se un'opera d'arte, — osserva il Cesareo nel suo saggio su La critica estetica appunto, — ha da provocare uno stato d'animo, appar manifesto che tanto più pieno sarà l'effetto finale, quanto più intense e concordi vi coopereranno tutte le singole determinazioni. Anche in estetica la somma è in ragion delle poste. L'esame di tutte a una a una le particolari espressioni ci darà la misura dell'espressione totale. Or come la perfetta riproduzione d'uno stato d'animo, in cui per l'appunto consiste la bellezza estetica, è un fatto emozionale che può risultare soltanto dalla somma d'alcune rappresentazioni sentimentali, così l'analisi psicologica d'un'opera di poesia è il necessario fondamento di qualsiasi valutazione estetica». Parlando di questo mio saggio sulla sua rivista La Critica (vol. VII, a. 1909, pagg. 219-23), il Croce, a proposito dello studio del Baldensperger Les définitions de l'humour (in Études d'histoire
- 67. littéraire, Paris, Hachette,1907), si compiace di dire che il Baldensperger ricorda anche le ricerche del Cazamian, edite nella Revue germanique del 1906: Pourquoi nous ne pouvons définir l'humour, in cui l'autore, seguace del Bergson, sostiene che l'umorismo sfugge alla scienza, perchè gli elementi caratteristici e costanti di esso sono in piccolo numero e sopratutto negativi, laddove gli elementi variabili sono in numero indeterminato. Per cui, il compito della critica è di studiare il contenuto e il tono di ogni umore e, cioè, la personalità di ciascun umorista. — Il n'y a pas d'humour, il n'y a que des humouristes, — dice il signor Baldensperger. E il Croce s'affretta a concludere: — La questione è così esaurita. Esaurita? Torniamo e torneremo sempre a domandare come mai, se l'umorismo non c'è, nè si sa, nè si può dire che cosa sia, ci sieno poi scrittori, di cui si possa sapere e dire che sono umoristi. In base a che cosa si saprà e si potrà dire? L'umorismo non c'è; ci sono scrittori umoristi. Il comico non c'è; ci sono scrittori comici. Benissimo! E se un tale, sbagliando, afferma che un tale scrittore umorista è un comico, come farò io a chiarirgli lo sbaglio, a dimostrargli che è un umorista e non un comico? Il Croce pone innanzi la pregiudiziale metodica circa la possibilità di definire un concetto. Io gli pongo innanzi questo caso, e gli domando come potrebbe egli dimostrare, per esempio, all'Arcoleo, il quale afferma che il personaggio di don Abbondio è comico, che invece no, quel personaggio è umoristico, se non avesse ben chiaro in mente che cosa sia e che debba intendersi per umorismo. Ma egli dice, in fondo, di non muover guerra alle definizioni, e che anzi il suo modo di rifiutarle tutte, filosocamente, è l'accettarle tutte, empiricamente. Anche la mia; che del resto non è, nè vuol essere una definizione, ma piuttosto la spiegazione di quell'intimo processo
- 68. che avviene, eche non può non avvenire, in tutti quegli scrittori che si dicono umoristi. L'Estetica del Croce è così astratta e negativa, che applicarla alla critica non è assolutamente possibile, se non a patto di negarla di continuo, com'egli stesso fa, accettando questi così detti concetti empirici che, cacciati dalla porta, gli rientrano dalla finestra. Ah, una bella soddisfazione, la filosofia! II Vediamo dunque, senz'altro, qual è il processo da cui risulta quella particolar rappresentazione che si suol chiamare umoristica; se questa ha peculiari caratteri che la distinguono, e da che derivano: se vi è un particolar modo di considerare il mondo, che costituisce appunto la materia e la ragione dell'umorismo. Ordinariamente, — ho già detto altrove,[51] e qui m'è forza ripetere — l'opera d'arte è creata dal libero movimento della vita interiore che organa le idee e le imagini in una forma armoniosa, di cui tutti gli elementi han corrispondenza tra loro e con l'idea-madre che le coordina. La riflessione, durante la concezione, come durante l'esecuzione dell'opera d'arte, non resta certamente inattiva: assiste al nascere e al crescere dell'opera, ne segue le fasi progressive e ne gode, raccosta i varii elementi, li coordina, li compara. La coscienza non rischiara tutto lo spirito; segnatamente per l'artista, essa non è un lume distinto dal pensiero, che permetta alla volontà di attingere in lei come in un tesoro d'immagini e d'idee. La coscienza, in somma, non è una potenza creatrice; ma lo specchio interiore in cui il pensiero si rimira; si può dire anzi ch'essa sia il pensiero che vede sè stesso, assistendo a quello che esso fa spontaneamente. E, d'ordinario, nell'artista, nel momento della concezione, la riflessione si nasconde, resta, per così dire, invisibile: è, quasi, per l'artista una forma del sentimento. Man mano che l'opera si fa, essa la critica,
- 69. non freddamente, comefarebbe un giudice spassionato, analizzandola; ma d'un tratto, mercè l'impressione che ne riceve. Questo, ordinariamente. Vediamo adesso se, per la natural disposizione d'animo di quegli scrittori che si chiamano umoristi e per il particolar modo che essi hanno di intuire e di considerar gli uomini e la vita, questo stesso procedimento avviene nella concezione delle loro opere; se cioè la riflessione vi tenga la parte che abbiamo or ora descritto, o non vi assuma piuttosto una speciale attività. Ebbene, noi vedremo che nella concezione di ogni opera umoristica, la riflessione non si nasconde, non resta invisibile, non resta cioè quasi una forma del sentimento, quasi uno specchio in cui il sentimento si rimira; ma gli si pone innanzi; lo analizza, spassionandosene; ne scompone l'imagine; da questa analisi però, da questa scomposizione, un altro sentimento sorge o spira: quello che potrebbe chiamarsi, e che io difatti chiamo il sentimento del contrario. Vedo una vecchia signora, coi capelli ritinti, tutti unti non si sa di quale orribile manteca, e poi tutta goffamente imbellettata, e parata d'abiti giovanili. Mi metto a ridere. Avverto che quella vecchia signora è il contrario di ciò che una vecchia rispettabile signora dovrebbe essere. Posso così, a prima, giunta e superficialmente, arrestarmi a questa impressione comica. Il comico è appunto un avvertimento del contrario. Ma se ora interviene in me la riflessione, e mi suggerisce che quella vecchia signora non prova forse nessun piacere a pararsi così come un pappagallo, ma che forse ne soffre e lo fa soltanto perchè pietosamente s'inganna che, parata così, nascondendo così le rughe e le canizie, riesca a trattenere a sè l'amore del marito molto più giovine di lei, ecco che io non posso più riderne come prima, perchè appunto la riflessione, lavorando in me, mi ha fatto andar oltre a quel primo avvertimento, o piuttosto, più addentro: da quel primo avvertimento del contrario mi ha fatto passare a questo sentimento del contrario. Ed è tutta qui la differenza, tra il comico e l'umoristico.
- 70. — «Signore, signore!oh! signore, forse, come gli altri, voi stimate ridicolo tutto questo; forse vi annojo raccontandovi questi stupidi e miserabili particolari della mia vita domestica; ma per me non è ridicolo, perchè io sento tutto ciò...» — Così grida Marmeladoff nell'osteria, in Delitto e Castigo del Dostojevski, a Raskolnikoff tra le risate degli avventori ubriachi. E questo grido è appunto la protesta dolorosa ed esasperata d'un personaggio umoristico contro chi, di fronte a lui, si ferma a un primo avvertimento superficiale e non riesce a vederne altro che la comicità. Ed ecco qua un terzo esempio, che per la sua lampante chiarezza, si potrebbe dir tipico. Un poeta, il Giusti, entra un giorno nella chiesa di Sant'Ambrogio a Milano, e vi trova un pieno di soldati, Di que' soldati settentrionali, Come sarebbe boemi e croati, Messi qui nella vigna a far da pali.... Il suo primo sentimento è d'odio: quei soldatacci ispidi e duri son lì a ricordargli la patria schiava. Ma ecco levarsi nel tempio il suono dell'organo: poi quel cantico tedesco lento lento, D'un suono grave, flebile, solenne che è preghiera e pare lamento. Ebbene, questo suono determina a un tratto una disposizione insolita nel poeta, avvezzo a usare il flagello della satira politica e civile: determina in lui la disposizione propriamente umoristica: cioè, lo dispone a quella particolar riflessione che, spassionandosi del primo sentimento, dell'odio suscitato dalla vista di quei soldati, genera appunto il sentimento del contrario. Il poeta ha sentito nell'inno la dolcezza amara Dei canti uditi da fanciullo: il core Che da voce domestica gl'impara, Ce li ripete i giorni del dolore. Un pensier mesto della madre cara,
- 71. Un desiderio dipace e d'amore, Uno sgomento di lontano esilio... E riflette che quei soldati, strappati ai loro tetti da un re pauroso, A dura vita, a dura disciplina Muti, derisi, solitari stanno, Strumenti ciechi d'occhiuta rapina Che lor non tocca e che forse non sanno. Ed ecco il contrario dell'odio di prima: Povera gente! lontana da' suoi In un paese qui che le vuol male... Il poeta è costretto a fuggir dalla chiesa perchè Qui, se non fuggo, abbraccio un caporale, Colla su' brava mazza di nocciuolo Duro e piantato lì come un piuolo. Notando questo, avvertendo cioè questo sentimento del contrario che nasce da una speciale attività della riflessione, io non esco affatto dal campo della critica estetica e psicologica. L'analisi psicologica di questa poesia è il necessario fondamento della valutazione estetica di essa. Io non posso intenderne la bellezza, se non intendo il processo psicologico da cui risulta la perfetta riproduzione di quello stato d'animo che il poeta voleva suscitare, nella quale consiste appunto la bellezza estetica. Vediamo ora un esempio più complesso, nel quale la speciale attività della riflessione non si scopre così a prima giunta; prendiamo un libro di cui abbiamo già discorso: il Don Quijote del Cervantes. Vogliamo giudicarne il valore estetico. Che faremo? Dopo la prima lettura e la prima impressione che ne avremo ricevuto, terremo conto anche qui dello stato d'animo che l'autore ha voluto suscitare. Qual'è questo stato d'animo? Noi vorremmo ridere di tutto quanto
- 72. c'è di comiconella rappresentazione di questo povero alienato che maschera della sua follia sè stesso e gli altri e tutte le cose; vorremmo ridere, ma il riso non ci viene alle labbra schietto e facile; sentiamo che qualcosa ce lo turba e ce l'ostacola; è un senso di commiserazione, di pena e anche d'ammirazione, sì, perchè se le eroiche avventure di questo povero hidalgo sono ridicolissime, pur non v'ha dubbio che egli nella sua ridicolaggine è veramente eroico. Noi abbiamo una rappresentazione comica, ma spira da questa un sentimento che ci impedisce di ridere o ci turba il riso della comicità rappresentata; ce lo rende amaro. Attraverso il comico stesso, abbiamo anche qui il sentimento del contrario. L'autore l'ha destato in noi perchè s'è destato in lui, e noi ne abbiamo già veduto le ragioni. Ebbene, perchè non si scopre qui la speciale attività della riflessione? Ma perchè essa — frutto della tristissima esperienza della vita, esperienza che ha determinato la disposizione umoristica nel poeta — si era già esercitata sul sentimento di lui, su quel sentimento che lo aveva armato cavaliere della fede a Lepanto. Spassionandosi di questo sentimento e ponendovisi contro, da giudice, nella oscura carcere della Mancha, ed analizzandolo con amara freddezza, la riflessione aveva già destato nel poeta il sentimento del contrario, e frutto di esso è appunto il Don Quijote: è questo sentimento del contrario oggettivato. Il poeta non ha rappresentato la causa del processo — come il Giusti nella sua poesia — ne ha rappresentato soltanto l'effetto, e però il sentimento del contrario spira attraverso la comicità della rappresentazione; questa comicità è frutto del sentimento del contrario generato nel poeta dalla speciale attività della riflessione sul primo sentimento tenuto nascosto. Ora, che bisogno ho io d'assegnare un qualsiasi valore etico a questo sentimento del contrario, come fa Theodor Lipps nel suo libro Komik und Humor? Cioè — intendiamoci bene — al Lipps veramente non si affaccia mai questo sentimento del contrario. Egli, da un canto, non vede che una specie di meccanismo così del comico come dell'umore: quello stesso che il Croce nella sua Estetica cita come un esempio di spiegazione
- 73. accettabile di siffatti«concetti»: — «Posto l'organismo nella situazione a, sopravvenendo la circostanza b, si ha il fatto c.» — E, dall'altro canto, s'impaccia di continuo di valori etici, poichè per lui ogni godimento artistico ed estetico in genere è godimento di qualcosa che ha valore etico: non già come elemento di un complesso, ma come oggetto dell'intuizione estetica. E tira continuamente in ballo il valore etico della personalità umana, e parla di positivo umano e di negazione di esso. Egli dice: «Dass durch die Negation, die am positiv Menschlichen geschieht, dies positiv Menschliche uns näher gebracht, in seinen Wert offenbarer und fühlbarer gemacht wird, darin besteht, wie wir sahen, das allgemeinste Wesen der Tragik. Ebendarin besteht auch das allgemeinste Wesen des Humors. Nur dass hier die Negation anderer Art ist als dort, nämlich komische Negation. Ich sagte vom Naivkomischen, dass es auf dem Wege liege von der Komik zum Humor. Dies heisst nicht: die naive Komik ist Humor. Vielmehr ist auch hier die Komik als solche das Gegenteil des Humors. Die naive Komik entsteht aus Berechtigte, Gute, Kluge, von unserem Standpunkte aus in gegenteiligen Lichte erscheint. Der Humor entseht umgekhert, indem jenes relativ Berechtigte, Gute, Kluge aus dem Prozess der komischen Vernichtung wiederum emportaucht, und nun erst recht in seinem Werte einleuchtet und genossen wird». E poco più oltre: «Der eigentliche Grund und Kern des Humors ist überall und jederzeit das relativ Gute, Schöne, Vernünftige, das auch da sich findet, wo es nach unserem gewönlichen Begriffen nicht vorhanden, ja geflissentlich negiert erscheint». Dice anche: «in der Komik nicht nur das Komische in nichts zergeht, sondern auch wir in gewisser Weise, mit unserer Erwartung, unserem Glauben an eine Erhabenheit oder Grösse, den Regeln oder Gewohnheiten unseres Denkens u. s. w. «zu nichte» werden. Über dieses eigene Zunichtewerden erhebt sich der Humor. Dieser Humor, der Humor, den wir angesichts des Komischen haben, besteht schliesslich ebenso wie derjenige, den der Träger des bewusst humoristischen Geschehens hat, in der Geistesfreiheit, der Gewissheit des eigenen Selbst und des Vernünftigen, Guten und Erhabenen in der Welt, die bei aller objektiven und eigenen Nichtigkeit bestehen bleit, oder
- 74. eben darin zurGeltung kommt». Ma è poi costretto a riconoscere egli stesso che «nicht jeder Humor diese höchste Stufe erreicht» e che vi ha «neben dem versöhnten, einen entzweiten Humor». Ma che bisogno ho io, ripeto, di dare un qualsiasi valore etico a quello che ho chiamato il sentimento del contrario, o di determinarlo a priori in alcun modo? Esso si determinerà da sè, volta per volta, secondo la personalità del poeta o l'oggetto della rappresentazione. Che importa a me, critico estetico, di sapere in chi o dove stia la ragion relativa e il giusto e il bene? Io non voglio nè debbo uscire dal campo della fantasia pura. Io mi pongo dinanzi qualunque rappresentazione artistica, e mi propongo soltanto di giudicarne il valore estetico. Per questo giudizio, ho bisogno innanzi tutto di sapere lo stato d'animo che quella rappresentazione artistica vuol suscitare: lo saprò dall'impressione che ne ho ricevuto. Questo stato d'animo, ogni qual volta mi trovo innanzi a una rappresentazione veramente umoristica, è di perplessità: io mi sento come tenuto tra due: vorrei ridere, rido, ma il riso mi è turbato e ostacolato da qualcosa che spira dalla rappresentazione stessa. Ne cerco la ragione. Per trovarla, non ho affatto bisogno di sciogliere l'espressione fantastica in un rapporto etico, di tirare in ballo il valore etico della personalità umana e via dicendo. Trovo questo sentimento del contrario, qualunque esso sia, che spira in tanti modi dalla rappresentazione stessa, costantemente in tutte le rappresentazioni che soglio chiamare umoristiche. Perchè limitarne eticamente la causa, oppure astrattamente, attribuendola, ad esempio, al disaccordo che il sentimento e la meditazione scoprono fra la vita reale e l'ideale umano o fra le nostre aspirazioni e le nostre debolezze e miserie? Nascerà anche da questo, come da tantissime altre cause indeterminabili a priori. A noi preme soltanto accertare che questo sentimento del contrario nasce, e che nasce da una speciale attività che assume nella concezione di siffatte opere d'arte la riflessione. III
- 75. Teniamoci a questo;seguiamo questa attività speciale della riflessione, e vediamo se essa non ci spiega, a una a una le varie caratteristiche, che si possono riscontrare in ogni opera umoristica. Abbiamo detto che, ordinariamente, nella concezione d'un'opera d'arte, la riflessione è quasi una forma del sentimento, quasi uno specchio in cui il sentimento si rimira. Volendo seguitar quest'imagine, si potrebbe dire che, nella concezione umoristica, la riflessione è, sì, come uno specchio, ma d'acqua diaccia, in cui la fiamma del sentimento non si rimira soltanto, ma si tuffa e si smorza: il friggere dell'acqua è il riso che suscita l'umorista; il vapore che n'esala è la fantasia spesso un po' fumosa dell'opera umoristica. — A questo mondo c'è giustizia finalmente! — grida Renzo, il promesso sposo, appassionato e rivoltato. — Tant'è vero che un uomo sopraffatto dal dolore non sa più quel che si dica, — commenta il Manzoni. Ecco la fiamma là del sentimento, che si tuffa qua e si smorza nell'acqua diaccia della riflessione. La riflessione, assumendo quella sua speciale attività, viene a turbare, a interrompere il movimento spontaneo che organa le idee e le immagini in una forma armoniosa. È stato tante volte notato che le opere umoristiche sono scomposte, interrotte, intramezzate di continue digressioni. Anche in un'opera così armonica nel suo complesso come I Promessi Sposi, è stato notato qualche difetto di composizione, una soverchia minuzia qua e là e il frequente interrompersi della rappresentazione o per richiami al famoso Anonimo o per l'arguta intrusione dell'autore stesso. Questo, che ai critici nostri è sembrato un eccesso per un verso, un difetto per l'altro, è poi la caratteristica più evidente di tutti i libri umoristici. Basta citare il Tristram Shandy dello Sterne, che è tutto quanto un viluppo di variazioni e digressioni, non ostante che l'autobiografo si proponga di narrar tutto ab ovo, punto per punto, e cominci dall'alvo di sua madre e dalla pendola che il signor Shandy padre soleva puntualmente caricare.
- 76. Ma se questacaratteristica è stata notata, non se ne son vedute chiaramente le ragioni. Questa scompostezza, queste digressioni, queste variazioni non derivano già dal bizzarro arbitrio o dal capriccio degli scrittori, ma sono appunto necessaria e inovviabile conseguenza del turbamento e delle interruzioni del movimento organatore delle immagini per opera della riflessione attiva, la quale suscita un'associazione per contrarii: le immagini cioè, anzichè associate per similazione o per contiguità, si presentano in contrasto: ogni immagine, ogni gruppo d'immagini desta e richiama le contrarie, che naturalmente dividono lo spirito, il quale, irrequieto, s'ostina a trovare o a stabilir tra loro le relazioni più impensate. Ogni vero umorista non è soltanto poeta, è anche critico, ma — si badi — un critico sui generis, un critico fantastico: e dico fantastico non solamente nel senso di bizzarro o di capriccioso, ma anche nel senso estetico della parola, quantunque possa sembrare a prima giunta una contraddizione in termini. Ma è proprio così; e però ho sempre parlato di una speciale attività della riflessione. Questo apparirà chiaro quando si pensi che se, indubbiamente, una innata o ereditata malinconia, le tristi vicende, un'amara esperienza della vita, o anche un pessimismo o uno scetticismo acquisito con lo studio e con la considerazione su le sorti dell'umana esistenza, sul destino degli uomini, ecc. possono determinare quella particolar disposizione d'animo che si suol chiamare umoristica, questa disposizione poi, da sola, non basta a creare un'opera d'arte. Essa non è altro che il terreno preparato: l'opera d'arte è il germe che cadrà in questo terreno, e sorgerà, e si svilupperà nutrendosi dell'umore di esso, togliendo cioè da esso condizione e qualità. Ma la nascita e lo sviluppo di questa pianta debbono essere spontanei. Apposta il germe non cade se non nel terreno preparato a riceverlo, ove meglio cioè può germogliare. La creazione dell'arte è spontanea: non è composizione esteriore, per addizione d'elementi di cui si siano studiati i rapporti: di membra sparse non si compone un corpo vivo, innestando, combinando. Un'opera d'arte, in somma, è, in quanto è «ingenua»; non può essere il risultato della riflessione cosciente.
- 77. La riflessione, dunque,di cui io parlo, non è un'opposizione del cosciente verso lo spontaneo; è una specie di proiezione della stessa attività fantastica: nasce dal fantasma, come l'ombra dal corpo; ha tutti i caratteri della «ingenuità» o natività spontanea; è nel germe stesso della creazione, e spira in fatti da essa ciò che ho chiamato il sentimento del contrario. Ben per questo ho soggiunto che l'umorismo potrebbe dirsi un fenomeno di sdoppiamento nell'atto della concezione. La concezione dell'opera d'arte non è altro, in fondo, che una forma dell'organamento delle immagini. L'idea dell'artista non è un'idea astratta; è un sentimento, che divien centro della vita interiore, si impadronisce dello spirito, l'agita e, agitandolo, tende a crearsi un corpo d'immagini. Quando un sentimento scuote violentemente lo spirito, d'ordinario, si svegliano tutte le idee, tutte le immagini che son con esso in accordo: qui, invece, per la riflessione inserta nel germe del sentimento, come un vischio maligno, si sveglian le idee e le immagini in contrasto. E la condizione, è la qualità che prende il germe, cadendo nel terreno che abbiamo più su descritto: gli s'inserisce il vischio della riflessione; e la pianta sorge e si veste d'un verde estraneo e pur con essa connaturato. A questo punto si fa avanti il Croce con tutta la forza della sua logica raccolta in un cosicchè, per inferire da quanto ho detto più su, ch'io contrappongo arte e umorismo. E si domanda: — «Vuol egli dire che l'umorismo non è arte, o che esso è più che arte? E, in questo caso, che cosa è mai? Riflessione su l'arte, e cioè critica d'arte? Riflessione sulla vita, e cioè filosofia della vita? O una forma sui generis dello spirito, che i filosofi, finora, non hanno conosciuta? Il P., se l'ha scoperta lui, avrebbe dovuto, a ogni modo, dimostrarla, assegnarle un posto, dedurla e farne intendere la connessione con le altre forme dello spirito. Il che non ha fatto, limitandosi ad affermare che l'umorismo è l'opposto dell'arte». Io mi guardo attorno sbalordito. Ma dove, ma quando mai ho affermato questo? Qui sta tra due: o io non so scrivere, o il Croce non sa leggere. Come c'entra la riflessione sull'arte che è critica
- 78. d'arte, e lariflessione sulla vita che è filosofia della vita? Io ho detto che ordinariamente, in generale, nella concezione d'un'opera d'arte, cioè mentre uno scrittore la concepisce, la riflessione ha un ufficio che ho cercato di determinare, per poi venire a determinare quale speciale attività essa assuma, non già sull'opera d'arte, ma in quella speciale opera d'arte che si chiama umoristica. Ebbene, perciò l'umorismo non è arte, o è più che alte? Chi lo dice? Lo dice lui, il Croce, perchè vuol dirlo, non perchè io non mi sia espresso chiaramente, dimostrando che è arte con questo particolar carattere, e chiarendo da che cosa le provenga, cioè da questa speciale attività della riflessione, la quale scompone l'immagine creata da un primo sentimento per far sorgere da questa scomposizione e presentarne un altro contrario, come appunto s'è veduto dagli esempii recati e da tutti gli altri che avrei potuto recare, esaminando a una a una le più celebrate opere umoristiche. Non vorrei ammettere un'ipotesi quanto mai ingiuriosa per il Croce, che cioè egli creda che un'opera d'arte si componga come un qualunque pasticcio con tanto d'uova, tanto di farina, tanto di questo o di quell'altro ingrediente, che si potrebbe anche mettere o lasciar fuori. Ma purtroppo mi vedo costretto da lui stesso ad ammettere una siffatta ipotesi, quand'egli «per farmi toccare con mano che l'umorismo come arte non si può distinguere dalla restante arte» pone questi due casi circa alla riflessione, di cui io — secondo lui — vorrei fare carattere distintivo dell'arte umoristica, quasi che fosse lo stesso dire così, in generale, la riflessione e parlare com'io faccio, d'una speciale attività della riflessione, più come processo intimo, immancabile nell'atto della concezione o della creazione di tali opere, che come carattere distintivo che per forza debba mostrarsi. Ma lasciamo andare. Pone, dicevo, questi due casi: che cioè, la riflessione «o entra, come componente nella materia dell'opera dell'arte e, in questo caso, tra l'umorismo e la commedia (o la tragedia o la lirica, e via dicendo), non vi ha differenza alcuna, giacchè in tutte le opere d'arte entra, o può entrare, il pensiero e la riflessione; ovvero rimane estrinseca, all'opera d'arte, e allora si avrà critica e non mai arte, e neppure arte umoristica». È
- 79. È chiaro. Ilpasticcio! Recipe: tanto di fantasia, tanto di sentimento, tanto di riflessione; impasta e avrai una qualunque opera d'arte, perchè nella composizione di una qualunque opera d'arte possono entrare tutti quegli ingredienti, e anche altri. Ma domando io: come c'entra questo pasticcio, questa composizione d'elementi come materia dell'opera d'arte, qualunque e comunque sia, con quello che io ho detto più su e che ho fatto vedere, punto per punto, parlando per esempio del Sant'Ambrogio del Giusti, quando ho mostrato come la riflessione, inserendosi come un vischio nel primo sentimento del poeta, che è d'odio verso quei soldatacci stranieri, generò a poco a poco il contrario del sentimento di prima? E forse perchè questa riflessione, sempre vigile e specchiante in ogni artista durante la creazione, non segue qua il primo sentimento, ma a un certo punto gli s'oppone, diventa perciò estrinseca all'opera d'arte, diventa perciò critica? Io parlo d'una attività intrinseca della riflessione, e non della riflessione come materia componente dell'opera d'arte. È chiaro! E non è credibile che il Croce non l'intenda. Non vuole intenderlo. E ne è prova quel suo voler far credere che siano imprecise le mie distinzioni e che io le ripeta e le modifichi e le temperi di continuo e che, quando altro non sappia, ricorra alle immagini; mentre invece negli esempii ch'egli cita di queste mie pretese ripetizioni e modificazioni e soccorrevoli immagini, sfido chiunque a scoprire il minimo disaccordo, la minima modificazione, il minimo temperamento della prima asserzione, e non piuttosto una più chiara spiegazione, una più precisa immagine; sfido chiunque a riconoscere con lui il mio imbarazzo, poichè i concetti, a suo dire, mi si sformano tra mano quando li prendo per porgerli altrui. Tutto questo è veramente pietoso. Ma tanto può sul Croce ciò che una volta egli s'è lasciato dire: che cioè dell'umorismo non si debba, nè si possa parlare. Andiamo avanti.
- 80. IV Per spiegarci laragione del contrasto tra la riflessione e il sentimento, dobbiamo penetrar nel terreno in cui il germe cade, voglio dire nello spirito dello scrittore umorista. Che se la disposizione umoristica per sè sola non basta, perchè ci vuole il germe della creazione, questo germe poi si nutre dell'umore che trova. Lo stesso Lipps che vede tre modi d'essere dell'umore, cioè: a) l'umore, come disposizione, o modo di considerar le cose; b) l'umore, come rappresentazione; c) l'umore obiettivo; conclude poi che in verità l'umore è soltanto in chi lo ha: soggettivismo e oggettivismo non sono altro che un diverso atteggiamento dello spirito nell'atto della rappresentazione. La rappresentazione cioè dell'umore, che è sempre in chi lo ha, può essere atteggiata in due modi: subiettivamente od obiettivamente. Quei tre modi d'essere si presentano al Lipps perchè egli limita e determina eticamente la ragione dell'umorismo, il quale è per lui, come abbiamo già veduto, superamento del comico attraverso il comico stesso. Sappiamo che cosa egli intenda per superamento. Io, secondo lui, ho umore, quando: «ich selbst bin der Erhabene, der sich Behauptende, der Träger des Vernünftigen Oder Sittlichen. Als dieser Erhabene, oder im Lichte dieses Erhabenen betrachte ich die Welt. Ich finde in ihr Komisches und gehe betrachtend in die Komick ein. Ich gewinne aber schliesslich mich selbst, oder des Erhabene in mir, erhöht, befestigt, gesteigert wieder». Ora questa per noi è una considerazione assolutamente estranea, prima di tutto, e poi anche unilaterale. Togliendo alla formula il valore etico, l'umorismo poi con essa riman considerato, se mai, nel suo effetto, non nella causa. Per noi tanto il comico quanto il suo contrario sono nella disposizione d'animo stessa ed insiti nel processo che ne risulta. Nella sua anormalità, non può esser che amaramente comica la condizione
- 81. d'un uomo chesi trova ad esser sempre quasi fuori di chiave, ad essere a un tempo violino e contrabbasso; d'un uomo a cui un pensiero non può nascere, che subito non gliene nasca un altro opposto, contrario; a cui per una ragione ch'egli abbia di dir sì, subito un'altra e due e tre non ne sorgano che lo costringono a dir no; e tra il sì e il no lo tengan sospeso, perplesso, per tutta la vita; d'un uomo che non può abbandonarsi a un sentimento, senza avvertir subito qualcosa dentro che gli fa una smorfia e lo turba e lo sconcerta e lo indispettisce. Questo stesso contrasto, che è nella disposizione dell'animo, si scorge nelle cose e passa nella rappresentazione. È una speciale fisionomia psichica, a cui è assolutamente arbitrario attribuire una causa determinante; può esser frutto d'una esperienza amara della vita e degli uomini, d'una esperienza che se, da un canto, non permette più al sentimento ingenuo di metter le ali e di levarsi come un'allodola perchè lanci un trillo nel sole, senza ch'essa la trattenga per la coda nell'atto di spiccare il volo; dall'altro induce a riflettere che la tristizia degli uomini si deve spesso alla tristezza della vita, ai mali di cui essa è piena e che non tutti sanno o possono sopportare; induce a riflettere che la vita, non avendo fatalmente per la ragione umana un fine chiaro e determinato, bisogna che, per non brancolar nel vuoto, ne abbia uno particolare, fittizio, illusorio, per ciascun uomo, o basso o alto; poco importa, giacchè non è, nè può essere il fine vero, che tutti cercano affannosamente e nessuno trova, forse perchè non esiste. Quel che importa è che si dia importanza a qualche cosa, e sia pur vana: varrà quanto un'altra stimata seria, perchè in fondo nè l'una nè l'altra daranno soddisfazione: tanto è vero che durerà sempre ardentissima la sete di sapere, non si estinguerà mai la facoltà di desiderare, e non è detto pur troppo che nel progresso consista la felicità degli uomini. Tutte le finzioni dell'anima, tutte le creazioni del sentimento vedremo esser materia dell'umorismo, vedremo cioè la riflessione diventar come un demonietto che smonta il congegno d'ogni immagine, d'ogni fantasma messo su dal sentimento; smontarlo per veder
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