Abstract
This chapter returns to the theoretical issues. On the basis of the preceding analyses of the literary texts and of the further analysis, as an example, of the “irregular” use of potential verbs in contemporary Japanese, I demonstrate that the idea of the impeccability of a native speaker (which consolidates “mother-tongue”) is a myth and that any (national) language is essentially hybrid and pluralistic.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Hornby’s Oxford Student’s Dictionary of Current English tells us that “language” is uncountable when it means “human communication of knowledge, ideas, feeling, etc. using a system of sound symbols,” but countable in the sense of the “form of this used by a nation or race.” Sakai is, obviously, arguing that “language” in the latter sense is also uncountable.
- 2.
Because of this, one author of an old textbook of Serbo-Croatian in Japanese even proposed to call the language(s) of Yugoslavia “Yugoslavian.” In the introduction to the textbook she asserts: “linguistically speaking, there is no such language as Yugoslavian. To be exact, it should be called Serbo-Croatian. But for now I will not adopt the rigorous term in linguistics, all the more because the given book is a practical conversation book. Instead, I will call the language Yugoslavian after the name of the country. This, I believe, is a sensible choice for convenience’s sake, but also because the term ‘Yugoslavian (language)’ is used widely in Europe and America, too” (Tobe 3). It is quite ironic, though, that, when the textbook was published in 1993, Yugoslavia had already collapsed. Furthermore, whether her assertion that the term “Yugoslavian” is widely used in Europe and America is valid or not is questionable to me. Her allegation does testify to the strong general association of a language with a nation(-state).
- 3.
According to Tanaka Katsuhiko, the linguistic distinction between Finnish and Karelian (between which, Tanaka argues, there is only a dialectal difference) has been sanctioned by the religious disagreement of the speakers of them: Protestants and Greek Orthodox (Beyond the National Language 186). He sees a similar situation for Croatian and Serbian. This does not necessarily undermine my political reading of the linguistic difference which attributes the distinction of languages to that of nations; it, on the contrary, reinforces it. Religion is superbly a political force of a nation. (The Church for Althusser is a typical ideological state apparatus.) Religions and language(s) are complicit in nationalistic politics, both being ideological state apparatuses, facilitating the delineation of nation-states and being, at the same time, delineated by them.
- 4.
With godan (five step) verbs, “the final kana [letter] of the dictionary form changes to another from the same row of the kana chart [a, i, u, e, o] when making different forms, and these changes involve all five vowels” (Bunt 25). “Ichidan verbs in the dictionary form end in a kana from the i or e line of the kana chart, followed by – ru” (24). Varying forms of verbs in Japanese are irrelevant to persons and numbers, but correlative to syntactical functions. It is, therefore, problematic to conceive of them as “conjugations” in the vein of Indo-European languages. We will not, however, explore this issue further, which is not related to the argument in this chapter.
- 5.
Incidentally, linguists generally agree that in this phenomenon what is really dropped is not ra, but ar (tabereru is formed by subtracting ar from taberAReru, not by subtracting ra from tabeRAreru (see, for instance, Inoue 22). The validity (or invalidity) of this linguistic observation is irrelevant here.
- 6.
“Social stratum” is a translation for kaisô. Tanaka distinguishes kaisôo from kaikyû (class) as a smaller unit of society. Although he is a socio-linguist with a Marxist bent, he insists that the concept of kaisô (social stratum) may be more appropriate for a nuanced understanding of social realities than that of class (Language at the Bar 91). I share his interest in smaller units of society in linguistic analyses. I will return to this thematic below.
- 7.
As if to endorse this tendency, Japanese: A Comprehensive Grammar of 2001 still states that the expression without ra is “regarded as ‘incorrect,’” although conceding that it is “in fact widely used in the spoken language” (Kaiser 386), whereas Jonathan Bunt’s The Oxford Japanese: Grammar and Verbs (2003) simply explains that “[i]n spoken Japanese, -rareru is often contracted in –reru” (67), treating an expression without ra as if it is an accepted usage.
- 8.
Tanaka must be referring to the Austrian philosopher Fritz Mautner. But as Tanaka does not document the citation, I have not been able to locate the original quote.
- 9.
Of course, I am making a reference to Homi Bhabha’s theory of colonial mimicking: “almost, but not quite” (Bhabha 129). Mimicry, thus “stricken by indeterminacy,” turns into a “process of disavowal” (122). What Bhabha theorizes in the context of colonization, I think, can be applied to the politico-linguistic interaction between the native (speakers) and the aliens with a difference that, here, it is the native (speaker) who possesses power and superiority. In the colonial situation, the natives can overturn this power relationship by mimicking the (alien) colonizers. Likewise (but in reverse), foreigners may usurp the authority of native speakers through mimicry.
- 10.
Naka Kansuke was born and grew up in Tokyo. As the author does not specify where this “seaside” is, we cannot determine in which dialect the driver is talking.
- 11.
Two models of linguistic change: the tree-model and the wave-model in contemporary linguistics is relevant here (see, for instance, Sebba 34).
- 12.
Such a notion (each area having one standard lexicon and one dialectal) conveniently endorses a view that a dialect is a sub-category of language. “[The assumption] that there are distinct languages, each with its subsidiary dialects” (Young 1217) has been invoked to consolidate the notion of a national language.
- 13.
Needless to say, we have to be cautious not to fall into the pitfall of nomenclaturalism that Saussure warns us against. Yanagita offers a map of the dialectal distributions of various signifiers for the signified “snail.” In the context of (national) languages, Saussure recommends us to be free from the fallacious conception that, for an animal “cat,” for instance, various nations subsequently name it with a variety of signifiers: “cat,” “chat,” “Katze,” “gatto,” “koshka,” “mao,” “neko,” and so on. This is nomenclaturalism. There is no “cat” before linguistic signification. Likewise, there is no (generic) “snail,” represented by one comprehensive signified “snail” for various signifiers in different dialects.
- 14.
Yanagita does not give a specific date for this except that it belongs to kinsei (late medieval to early modern periods).
- 15.
The qualifier of “sub-” should not be taken to uphold a holistic nature of the meta-category of “language,” under which dialects, jargon, speech genres, and so on, are subsumed. Certain vocational groups may understand one another better across the boundaries of languages than those within the same national linguistic community. Japanese otaku with their specific jargon may find it easier to communicate with American cyber-nerds, although he/she, then, has to use English, than to communicate with non-otaku Japanese. A similar phenomenon may be observed among students, although in this case the transgression of not national linguistic boundaries, but that of dialectal ones is at issue. In The Characters of the Present-day Students the author Tsubouchi footnotes a discourse of students he describes: “Readers may be wondering what region the language [of this student] represents. It cannot be determined as a dialect of a specific province. It should be understood as an incoherent speech prevalent in students’ societies. Among the students it happens that a native of Kyoto-Osaka ( Kamigata ) intentionally imitates a dialect of Tosa [present-day Kochi Prefecture] and it is generally difficult to determine the reginal origin of students’ discourse” (63). Students’ jargon traverses dialectal boundaries.
- 16.
I should mention here that Kinsui proposes the “role-expressing-jargon” in the quality of not so much real verbal practice as representation. Academics are expected to speak and are described as speaking in the patois of academicians, rather than they are in reality in the habit of speaking in that patois. This should not constitute a theoretical difficulty for my argument. We are concerned about the diversion from the standard language within a supposedly unitary speech community, be it represented or actual, fictional or non-fictional. Incidentally, representation is a form of quoting, a phenomenon that we shall be discussing in the next section. A speaker re-presents an academic by quoting his/her academic patois. This is the very nature of hybrid linguistic activity that we have been examining in this chapter.
- 17.
A fabulous historical example of this is given by Tanaka Katsuhiko in his Language at the Bar. He writes of recent cases when the Japanese minorities such as Ainu have demanded to speak in their mother-tongue in court. Tanaka further cites a lawsuit of a group of Southerners against the construction of a thermoelectric power plant in the area where they lived. One of the complainants refused to speak in the standard Japanese at the court (142; the citation below is from the original source):
- Judge::
-
I will warn the plaintiff one more time … You have to speak in the standard language, since your statement in the dialect impedes comprehension.
- Mr. Nabei [In the Southern dialect]::
-
His Honor, your warning is very unfair. Do you know a word in the Buzen dialect, “inochiki”?
- Judge::
-
Inochiki?
- Mr. Nabei::
-
See? You don’t know. It means “life.” It means earning money and making one’s living. If you don’t understand even such a simple word in dialect, you will never understand the feeling of us who have started the lawsuit. Whatever it takes, I will speak in my dialect in this case. (Matsushita 190)
Tanaka quotes this case as an example of a fight of speakers of dialects against the national language: a dialect is incomprehensible to a speaker of the standard language. But if one investigates the case cautiously, one would find that the mal-communication arose in this case as much because of the difference in speech genres: the judge speaking in legal jargon, the plaintiff speaking in the provincial commoners’ talk.
- 18.
However, rather unexpectedly, Voloshinov did not see this interference as dialogic: “We are dealing here with words reacting on words. However, this phenomenon is distinctly and fundamentally different from dialogue. In dialogue, the lines of the individual participants are grammatically disconnected; they are not integrated into one unified context. Indeed, how could they be? There are no syntactic forms with which to build a unity of dialogue. If, on the other hand, a dialogue is presented as embedded in an authorial context, then we have a case of direct discourse” (116, emphasis in original). I challenge the notion of “syntactic unity” that a participant of a dialogue is supposed (by Voloshinov) to possess. Any enunciation (in dialogue or otherwise) is essentially schizophrenic, lacking unity. Voloshinov’s notion of the “syntactic unity” of a single enunciation can probably be best seen in the light of the “unity of national language” that Bakhtin takes for granted. Also, we saw in Chapters 5 and 6 ample examples of the interference between the speaker and the listener-reporter or between one linguistic system and another even in the case of direct discourse.
- 19.
This can be related to Gérard Genette’s narrative theory that every narration is fundamentally a first-person narration since any statement can be interpreted as a statement with “I (a narrator or an author) say that” omitted. That is to say, every narration is a reported speech. Genette explains: “[T]hese common locutions [‘first person—or third-person—narrative’] seem to me inadequate, in that they stress variation in the element of the narrative situation that is in fact invariant—to wit, the presence (explicit or implicit) of the ‘person’ of the narrator. This presence is invariant because the narrator can be in his narrative (like every subject of an enunciating in his enunciated statement) only in the ‘first person’” (243–4). To give a concrete example of “concealed first-person narration,” Lev Tolstoy’s famous first line of Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” (15) can be paraphrased as: “I, Tolstoy, will tell you that ‘Happy families are all alike…’” Tolstoy’s narratives in his various works are, just like Anna Karenina, mostly in third-person narration and have a marked objective overtone. In contrast, in Dostoevsky’s narratives, very often the concealed (first-person) narrator comes to the surface. Thus, the opening lines of Brothers Karamazov read: “Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov, a landowner of our district, who became notorious in his own day (and is still remembered among us) because of his tragic and mysterious death, which occurred exactly thirteen years ago and which I shall relate in its proper place. For the present all I shall say about this ‘landowner’ is …” (3, emphases added) The surfacing of the narrating “I” in this opening passage is, in fact, foreseen in the author’s Introduction “To the Reader,” which starts: “In beginning the biography of my hero, Alexey Fyodorovich Karamazov, I find myself in some difficulty” (xxv). Bakhtin criticized Tolstoy for his monologism as opposed to dialogic Dostoevsky (See, for example, Problems 69–73). The difference in their modes of narration may reflect this contrast.
- 20.
“‘Register’ describes variation in language according to use. It captures the intuition that there are functionally distinct varieties of language in such situations as sport, science, or advertising. Such variation contrasts with variation by user, or dialectal variation” (Asher et al., The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics 7: 3509).
- 21.
Of course, it would seem perfectly legitimate to be analyzing cases where reporting and reported discourses are in different languages. For our present concern, Voloshinov does make a reference to the function of mother-tongue (native language): “Individuals do not receive a ready-made language at all, rather, they enter upon the stream of verbal communication; indeed, only in this stream does their consciousness first begin to operate. Only in learning a foreign language does a fully prepared consciousness—fully prepared thanks to one’s native language—confront a fully prepared language which it need only accept. People do not accept their native language—it is in their native language that they first reach awareness. The process of a child’s assimilation of his native language is the process of his gradual immersion into verbal communication. As that process of immersion proceeds, the child’s consciousness is formed and filled with content” (81). I am fully sympathetic with Voloshinov’s communicative and dialogic model of language acquisition, reminiscent of Vygotsky’s theory. It is just that, unfortunately (from my perspective), Voloshinov essentializes a foreign language, which, in contrast to a native language, is a static (“fully prepared”) given for him, something that a learner just has to “accept.”
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Yokota-Murakami, T. (2018). Deconstructing Language as a Ground for Mother-Tongue. In: Mother-Tongue in Modern Japanese Literature and Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8512-3_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8512-3_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-10-8511-6
Online ISBN: 978-981-10-8512-3
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)