The shift between personal pronouns and jibun: its strategic use in a Japanese teenagers' talk show

Tomoko Ikuta Ernst, Linguistics

The paper examines how Japanese teenagers use the word jibun (‘self’) strategically as a contextualization cue.  Interactants use such a cue to signal indexical meanings they create during an interaction (Gumperz, 1982).  Drawing on Ostermann’s innovative idea of pronoun shift as a code-alternation (2003), I consider the use of jibun instead of other personal pronouns as a contextualization cue.  Although jibun has been studied extensively in grammatical analyses, its use as a strategic maneuver has not been examined.  I perform a qualitative analysis of transcribed data from a Japanese TV talk show Shaberiba (a teenagers’ talk show) to examine the situations in which both ‘pronouns’ are used by the same speakers. 

    The data analysis focuses on the shift from the 1^st person pronoun (e.g. ore/atashi/boku) to jibun.  It shows that speakers use jibun to signal changes in interactional stances or alignment in relation to others.  For example, some speakers use jibun to mark their uniqueness or their emphasized position.  Conversely, it is also used to minimize the distance with others.  The use of jibun within a frame of personal pronoun seems to differ from speaker to speaker, creating different strategic effect.

    The paper emphasizes the speakers’ action and analyzes the interactional functions of jibun as a contextualization cue.  The analysis shows heterogeneous ways in which teenagers use jibun in a talk show.  It also shows the dynamic nature of their self.  By shifting the ‘pronouns’, the Japanese teenagers were able to adjust the social distance with others during an interaction.