[The presentation will be in French]
In the field of intercultural communication, a vast amount of research has been conducted on various languages, but empirical data on French–Japanese interactions are still scarce. Our study focuses on the professional context in France and aims at analyzing the difficulties encountered by Japanese people in interactions at work, both at the sociopragmatic level (Thomas 1983) and the emotional level (Pavlenko 2005).
Our corpus is composed of a set of semi-structured interviews conducted with 10 Japanese people working in France*. Most of them arrived in France as adults, but the duration of residence varied from 2–50 years. The questions focused on the differences and similarities in interactional behavior between the two cultures at the workplace. The data collected concern various speech acts such as refusal, apology, and compliment, and are discussed by comparing them between professional and everyday interactions. The reason for this is that problems encountered in workplace interactions may have different consequences from conversations in everyday life, such as impacts on work flow, difficulties in gaining trust within the team, or obtaining a promotion.
The interviewees' narratives reveal how difficult it is for them to modify the communicative ethos-the underlying cultural values that make up the implicit norms for communication (Kerbrat-Orecchioni, 2002 ; Béal, 2010). However, with years of experience in the French professional setting, some have found ways to deal with the difficulties they face. Through this study, we aim to suggest some points of discussion that can be helpful for a better understanding of intercultural interactions in the workplace.
*This study is supported by JSPS Kakenhi Grant Number 19K00857.
References
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