Use of "incomplete utterance" in conversations of Korean and Japanese female university students

Abstract

In this study, I analyzed conversations of friends and first-time encounters between female university students in Korea and Japan, and investigated the use of incomplete utterance from the viewpoint of expression form and utterance function focusing on intimacy factors. The results are summarized as follows.BR The use rate of incomplete utterance was higher in conversations of Japanese female university students than in conversations of Korean female university students in both conversations of friends and first-meeting conversations. From this result, it became clear that incomplete utterance is one of the characteristics of the Japanese spoken language. On the other hand, the use rate of incomplete utterance was higher in-first meeting conversations than in conversations between friends in both Korea and Japan, indicating that incomplete utterance is used as a linguistic strategy to show mental attitude toward the conversation partner. Next, looking at the expression form of incomplete utterance, the use rate of the conjunctive particles was very high in both Korean female university student conversations and Japanese female university student conversations, indicating that conjunctive particles are the main expression form of incomplete utterance used in conversations between Korean and Japanese female university students. In addition, the use rate of nouns was relatively high in conversations between friends compared to first-meeting conversations in both Korea and Japan. This result suggests that there is a preferred form of incomplete utterance depending on the degree of intimacy with the conversation partner. In addition to these features related to linguistic forms, one of the characteristics of Japanese female university students