‘You must have a wealth of stories’: Cross-linguistic differences between addressee support behaviour in Australian and Japanese

This article investigates the various types of support that addressees provide to a speaker who is telling a story. It compares addressee support behaviour in two societies, Japan and Australia, exploring how disparities between the two might relate to differences in the social regimentation of polite and friendly conversation in these cultures. At the level of politeness and friendliness, addressee support behaviour includes three types of listener responses: (1) minimal responses, which consist of continuers and acknowledgements, (2) assessments and (3) questions. These three categories are chosen for analysis as they define most clearly the differences between participants on the listening end of narration in each language. The topic of this article is highly relevant to current issues in conversation analysis and cross-cultural communication, and the corpus of stories recorded for this study as well as the study's methodological approaches have the potential to empirically support or challenge current views on the effects of culture on language use.