open access

https://hdl.handle.net/2115/43829

Texts Written in Conversational Form and Media Communication : The Manner of Exchanges of Lines by Characters

日本語

談話分析

2010-03-25

91 p.

These days we see many types of writings on the media such as newspapers, magazines, books, or Internet sites. This paper deals with one specific type of text: texts written in “conversational form.” We sometimes come across a column or an article in a newspaper or a magazine which is written as a dialogue form, instead of using an ordinary prose statement. In such a text, we find some characters who talk to each other. The text usually consists of the characters’ names and their lines with few or no narrative part. Why are they written in such a form? We may find an answer to this question by analyzing those texts published actually on the media and focusing on the communications between writers and readers. There is little research available on conversational form itself. However, we can get some suggestion from observation of drama discourse, illustrative sentences in textbooks of foreign language, interviews in magazines and books, or philosophical texts like the Dialogues of Plato. For example, a conversation between characters within a text is not a copy of natural conversation but have some unique features as an artifact (Kumagai 2003). So it seems that they have some similarity to conversation in fiction. It is characterized by “double structure of communication,” which is assumed to consist of two levels of communication: “the micro-communication” between the characters, and “the macro-communication” between the writer and readers (Yamaguchi 1998, 2007). Through analyzing the manner of exchanges of lines by characters, therefore, we can know something about the nature of the macro-communication that influences it. The data for this study are 14 texts which I have obtained in articles in newspapers, magazines, books, or a leaflet. These are classified into three groups according to what kinds of roles are played by characters in the micro-communication: Questioner and Answerer, Teacher and Student, or any other case. Then we see how characters exchange their lines in each group. Texts of the first group are composed of simple repetition of question and answer, while the second group has the story in which characters cancel their temporary opposition and reach an agreement in the end. In the latter case, characters seem to talk to each other as if there were a sort of “the preestablished harmony.” In contrast with this, it seems that each of the characters in the third group behaves in his/her own way and sometimes insert a small talk into the conversation. Furthermore, the personalities set on the characters are also seems to differ between the three groups. Considering these facts, the communication in conversational form is unique in some respects. For a writer, the conversation by characters seems to be a result of deformation of his/her latent, internal dialogue. So the characters can be seen as the writer’s alter egos. They shoulder a burden of responsibility for their speeches in place of the writer and put him/her into the background. Then readers can think themselves as the auditors of the characters’ relaxed chat, but not as the addressees spoken to. If so, there is possibility that some texts in conversational form could be characterized as not only transmission of information but also “the phatic communion” between the writer and readers in which they are enjoying the same communication space together.

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