ドイツ語と日本語におけるE-メールの対照研究 : 筆記による依頼のストラテジー

E-メールで依頼を行う場合に、'適切な言葉遣いをする'というのは、たとえ母語話者であっても容易なことではない。まして、丁寧さを表す仕組みが、母語のそれと明確に異なる外国語で表現するとなるとなおさらである(vgl. Matsumoto 1988; Ide 1989)。本稿では、E-メールで依頼を実行する際に、ドイツ語と日本語の筆記において.どのような慣習的相違が見られるかを明確にするため、実験的な調査(n=200)に基づいて、E-メールにおける依頼のやり取りを分析する。その際、Brown/Levinson(1987)の理論およびBlum-Kulka et al.(1989)による調査を手がかりにして、状況的な要因に依存した異なる依頼のストラテジーの使用に焦点をあてる。その際、とりわけ、対象とした言語(ドイツ語・日本語)で同じストラテジーが使用される点を示すとともに、その使用に対しては.言語により異なる重点が置かれること、また状況に応じてどのストラテジーが使用されるかという点で相違が見られることも明示する。

Acquiring communicative L2 writing competence is a challenging task: However, the adequate performance of potentially face-threatening speech acts, such as requests, is crucial when it comes to maintaining good personal relations with readers; nowadays this is most noticable in e-mail correspondence.

In order to facilitate the teaching of culturally specific text norms and to account for frequently observed transfer mistakes in learners' texts, writing styles have to be contrastively described in the learners' L1 and their target language. Previous research revealed cross-cultural differences in the realisation of spoken requests (Blum-Kulka et. al, 1989); and it has been pointed out that Japanese politeness structures differ considerably from those of Western languages (Matsumoto, 1988; Ide, 1989).

In view of the lack of research on written requests, and to contribute to the comparison of politeness styles in Eastern and Western languages, the aim of this paper is to describe differences in requestive behaviour in German and Japanese e-mails. For this study 200 e-mails written by German and Japanese students were collected in an experimental design. Their contents as well as their formal and linguistic properties were analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively.

These and other findings shall contribute to the development of teaching materials that will enable Japanese students to write German e-mails more appropriately and to encourage them to write e-mails in their target language.