Expressing Silence: Where Language and Culture Meet in Japanese - Paperback

by Natsuko Tsujimura (Author)

In Expressing Silence: Where Language and Culture Meet in Japanese, Natsuko Tsujimura discusses how silence is conceptualized and linguistically represented in Japanese. Languages differ widely in the specific linguistic and rhetorical modes through which vivid depictions of silence are achieved. In Japanese, sounds in nature evoke silence, and onomatopoeia plays an important role in simulating silent scenes. These linguistic mechanisms mediate the perception of the symbiotic relationship between sound and silence, a perception deeply embedded in the Japanese cultural experience. Expressing Silence brings the tools of both linguistic and cultural analysis in examining the remarkably rich array of representations of silence in Japanese language and culture, finding that depictions of silence through language cannot be understood without exploring what sound or silence mean to the speakers.

Author Biography

Natsuko Tsujimura is professor emerita of East Asian languages and cultures and adjunct professor emerita of linguistics at Indiana University Bloomington.