| in | The Bulletin of the Institute of Socio-Information and Communication Studies, the University of Tokyo, No.57, 1999, pp.17-42 |
A new type of wakamono-gos (young people's own slang) have become used frequently among Japanese young people in 1990s --- toka, tte-iuka, tte-kanji, mitaina and so on. These wakamono-gos are standard words or lexical items in Japanese language, but young people use these words in conversation in the way deviant from standard Japanese usage. For example, toka may be used in standard usage to mean that the speaker is not certain of the content expressed in his utterance, in the case of
"Yamada toka iu hito" (a person called something like Yamada). On the other hand, young people may overuse toka even in the case that it is not necessary
to express uncertainness of their utterance content, e.g. "Kino toka siken toka atta" (I had something like an exam something like yesterday).
From the viewpoint of speech act theory, these young people's new speech styles have a certain pragmatic effect on speaker-hearer's interpersonal relationship set up by the utterance. It is the effect to make weaken speaker's commitment to the interpersonal relationship with the hearer or to make his position as communicative agent distant from the relationship with the hearer set up by the speech act.
In order to examine what kind of interpersonal attitude concerns young people's use of these new-type wakamono-gos, I made a preliminary survey on Toyo University students in April of 1998. The main questions are on the use of two groups of wakamono-gos (one group has the pragmatic effect described above and the other group does not have the effect by contrast), the interpersonal relationship with friends, and the use and mental attitudes on telephone which is important medium used to communicate with friends. I analyze 250 valid answers by statistical methods, and the result of my analysis shows that;
The frequency of use of the new-type wakamono-gos does not correlate to number of friends on statistically significant level, and it correlates positively on significant level to one of three social-psychological scales which indicates intimate relationship with friends. And also the significant correlation is verified with the scales which indicates the interpersonal attitudes to prefer to switch over friends in company according to the mood or situation of the moment. This correlation is a specific tendency of the new wakamono-gos which have the pragmatic effect on the interpersonal relationship, because the frequency of use of the other contrast group of wakamono-gos does not correlate to this scale of friend-switching attitude.
In addition, it is verified that the friend-switching attitude correlates positively the frequency to phone friends and the ratio of personal possession of cellular phones. This may suggest that young people use telephones and cellular phones as a remote controller to switch or flip channels to communicate with their friends.