Response Cries or Response Statements? A Cross-Linguistic Analysis of Interjectional Expressions in Japanese and English

Goffman (1978: 800) claims that "[a] response cry doesn't seem to be a statement in the linguistic sense (even a heavily elided one)," which suggests that such cries do not have the linguistic structures of statements (or descriptions) of either a speaker's emotion/ sensation or evaluation of a situation. This study conducted a questionnaire survey targeting Japanese and American English speakers to investigate expressions they will produce under eight circumstances of Goffman's response cries. The results were con-trary to Goffman's claim. About half of the Japanese response cries were "descriptive interjections" like Ita(i) 'Painful' and Yaba(i) Awful, and so were about 17 percent of the American response cries. On the other hand, non-descriptive interjections (swear words, vocatives) were more favoured by American English speakers, but extremely rare in Japanese. This study also addresses the questions of sociality and/or dialogicity of response cries in the two languages.