Contrastive linguistics: Discourse analysis of Japanese and Cantonese

Japanese-medium elective

This Japanese-medium content course explores the structure and function of speech acts of the two languages. Examples will be drawn from everyday conversations that include request, acceptance, refusal, apology, etc. to investigate how people carry out conversations in order to accomplish their goals in speech acts. Research methods will be introduced through analysis of sample speech acts in Japanese. Students are required to collect conversation data in Japanese and Cantonese and analyze structures, expressions, and intensions of the discourse, based on major theories in pragmatics and present a comparative study on Japanese and Cantonese in the forms of written and oral report.