Papers by Yukiko Nishimura
This article combines two approaches to analysing linguistic features in online communities that ... more This article combines two approaches to analysing linguistic features in online communities that are argued to complement one another: computer‑mediated discourse analysis (Herring 2004 and wakimae or discernment (Ide 1989. A structural analysis was conducted of four threads on two open‑access Japanese bulletin board system (BBS websites in terms of politeness or honorifics and possible determinants of particular linguistic characteristics were explored. The study finds that discussion topics are relevant to choices of politeness levels and that overall linguistic styles are linked to the norms of each community. On one of the BBS linguistic features reveal widespread impoliteness yet participants seem to share a strong sense of community. Watts' (2003 concept of contextually appropriate "politic" behaviour is invoked to reconcile the puzzling coexistence of impoliteness and sense of community.
Digital Discourse: Language in the New Media, 2011
... Sky 2006 1200 Best seller, adapted as film, TV, comics 3 Mei Akai Ito Red Thread 2006 12... more ... Sky 2006 1200 Best seller, adapted as film, TV, comics 3 Mei Akai Ito Red Thread 2006 1200 Best seller, adapted as film 4 Kiki Atashi Kanojo I ... Teidan--: Keitai shôsetsu wa sakka wo korosu ka.[Tripartite discussion: Would keitai novels kill authors?] January, 190208. ...
This study discusses Japanese computer-mediated communication (CMC), specifically focusing on mes... more This study discusses Japanese computer-mediated communication (CMC), specifically focusing on messages sent to open-access bulletin board system (BBS) websites. It first compares quantitatively CMC language with speech and writing and finds that interjections distinguish speech from CMC and writing. CMC is distinguished from writing by uses o f particles. Uses o f auxiliary verbs separate the two target websites, Channel 2 and Yahoo within CMC. Based on the linguistic characterisation o f the CMC language, the thesis further discusses qualitatively politeness and impoliteness behaviours in the two target BBS websites with contrasting linguistic features. This study points out that one theory o f politeness proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987) can explain impolite behaviour in Channel 2, but not politeness in Yahoo, and that another theoiy proposed by Ide (1989) can explain polite behaviour in Yahoo, but not impoliteness in Channel 2. A third theory from a discursive approach proposed by Locher and Watts (2005) is shown to be capable o f synthesising the two contrasting situations. In the following chapters, concepts o f online community are employed to discuss politeness issues in conjunction with the sense o f community. Here differences in discussion topics are found to be relevant to both the sense o f community and linguistic choices o f polite/impolite language, across the two target websites. Seemingly impolite behaviour in Channel 2, where users have a strong sense o f community can be explained by the concept o f contextual appropriateness by Watts. Underlying the topics specifically addressed in the thesis, this study also identifies the greater role played by technology in Japanese CMC than in English CMC. It fills a research gap in linguistic study on CMC language in Japanese, politeness and impoliteness research in online context as well as online community studies in Japanese cultural contexts. It is expected to contribute to understanding Japanese CMC linguistically and socio-culturally, as well as politeness and impoliteness and online community research in general. x ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I must express my appreciation to a number of people who have helped me before and during the writing of this dissertation. I would like to thank, first of all, my supervisory team at Sheffield Hallam University. My deepest gratitude goes to Simeon Yates, whose works originally inspired me to compare CMC with speech and writing, and who also made the dissertation project possible as director of my studies. I cannot express more fully how much I own him for his support, input and generous sharing of time despite the distance between the UK and Japan, throughout the entire PhD process. Then I must thank Karen Grainger for her valuable and detailed comments and suggestions on the manuscripts from a sociolinguisf s perspective. During my visits to Sheffield, she also generously shared time and offered encouragement. Furthermore, my thanks go to Sara Mills for her helpful suggestions and insightful comments on politeness issues, which contributed to improving the quality of the thesis. I would also like to thank Masayoshi Hirose at International Christian University in Tokyo, who offered me support and encouragement as my local supervisor. Without their support and guidance, the dissertation would not have taken this shape. I also thank administrative support at Sheffield Hallam University for their assistance. My second home when I was at Sheffield was provided by Judith and Brian Rossiter, whose generosity and kindness is gratefully acknowledged. Among linguists who I have referred in the thesis are scholars who deserve special thanks, including Patricia M. Clancy for her long-standing friendship and encouragement from Berkeley to Tokyo to Santa Barbara, Maty Bucholtz for her vision, insight and support, Sachiko Ide for her encouragement since I was an undergraduate, and Susan Herring and Brenda Danet for providing with an initial opportunity to research Japanese CMC. My gratitude also goes to my colleagues, both academic and administrative staff, at Toyo Gakuen University. I would like to express my heartfelt thanks not only for their understanding of my undertaking of this project but also their moral support, encouragement and friendship. I cannot name them all here, but I especially benefited from Noriyuki Yasumatsu, who offered input on ethical and legal matters of CMC research, and Sarah Louisa Birchley and Andrew Boon, who read an earlier version of the manuscript and provided helpful comments. Also, this entire project has greatly been benefited from efficient and conscientious assistance from staff members of the Library and the Media Centre at Toyo Gakuen University. In addition, I'm grateful to Patrick William Galbraith, who generously spent his time editing and proofreading the manuscript and Naomi Hosojima for her assistance in the preparation of the thesis. My special thanks go to my daughters, Keiko and Eiko, who initially opened the door for me to the world of Japanese CMC, which has fascinated me to the point of the present thesis. Finally I would like to dedicate this thesis to my husband, Kiyohiko, who has shared the realities with me, despite his busy schedule, offering wisdom, patience, generosity and love all the time. Thank you. 1 Though this word can be pronounced as[ko:do:], the Romanisation does not take koodoo because the hiragana representation has u (0) instead o f o (£5). 2 i f-ff is an unconventional orthography, while i f 0-ff is the standard way of writing. It is also possible to use i f do ■?, which is also an unconventional representation. To represent the unconventional use o f the vowel lengthening bar in i f-ff , a diacritic is added on top o f the Roman script for the vowel. This representation distinguishes the other unconventional writing o f i f t e^, as can be seen in its Romanisation o f doozo, which follows the basic principle for Romanisation for transliterating hiragana syllabary to Roman alphabet. 3 There are variations on katakana representations o f some loan words regarding the use o f lengthening bar. In =r > \ f a. the word-final lengthening bar may or may not be used, while the first bar is the standard. Kaizu provides hiragana representation for words normally written in katakana, to show how they can be pronounced, and following her system, the lengthening bar in katakana is represented by repeating the vowel script in Romanisation, as the hiragana representation in the parentheses shows. NOTES ON ABBREVIATIONS In the linguistic examples used in the thesis, Japanese scripts appear in the first line, its Romanisation in the second line, a word-for-word or morpheme-for-morpheme gloss in the third line. Their tree translation is given below these representations. Japanese scripts appear in the examples, because they are considered helpful to understand the practices o f the BBS users discussed in the thesis, as they do not always follow the standard Japanese orthography. The following abbreviations are used in the examples:
This study discusses Japanese computer-mediated communication (CMC), specifically focusing on mes... more This study discusses Japanese computer-mediated communication (CMC), specifically focusing on messages sent to open-access bulletin board system (BBS) websites. It first compares quantitatively CMC language with speech and writing and finds that interjections distinguish speech from CMC and writing. CMC is distinguished from writing by uses of particles. Uses of auxiliary verbs separate the two target websites, Channel 2 and Yahoo within CMC. Based on the linguistic characterisation of the CMC language, the thesis further discusses qualitatively politeness and impoliteness behaviours in the two target BBS websites with contrasting linguistic features. This study points out that one theory of politeness proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987) can explain impolite behaviour in Channel 2, but not politeness in Yahoo, and that another theory proposed by Ide (1989) can explain polite behaviour in Yahoo, but not impoliteness in Channel 2. A third theory from a discursive approach proposed b...
This study discusses the language of blogs, which can reach readers beyond space and time on the ... more This study discusses the language of blogs, which can reach readers beyond space and time on the Internet. With rapidly rising ageing population in contemporary Japan, the study focuses on blog posts by Japanese older men and women compared with the younger counterparts. It attempts to clarify recently emerging senior citizens’ computer-mediated communication (CMC), which has been understudied, unlike youth’s online behaviour.
Routledge Handbook of Japanese Sociolinguistics
... If non-honorifics are used to express impoliteness in a community where honorifics are the un... more ... If non-honorifics are used to express impoliteness in a community where honorifics are the unmarked norm of linguistic practices among people in distanced relationships, it has a marked effect on the community and could lead to community dissolution. ...
2012 Aaai Fall Symposium Series, Oct 19, 2012
... Based on the linguistic characterisation of the CMC language, the thesis further discusses qu... more ... Based on the linguistic characterisation of the CMC language, the thesis further discusses qualitatively politeness and impoliteness behaviours in the two target BBS websites with contrasting linguistic features. This study points ...
This article combines two approaches to analysing linguistic features in online communities that ... more This article combines two approaches to analysing linguistic features in online communities that are argued to complement one another: computer‑mediated discourse analysis (Herring 2004 and wakimae or discernment (Ide 1989. A structural analysis was conducted of four threads on two open‑access Japanese bulletin board system (BBS websites in terms of politeness or honorifics and possible determinants of particular linguistic characteristics
The Multilingual Internet, 2007
Redox Biology, 2014
Lipid peroxidation products have been known to induce cellular adaptive responses and enhance tol... more Lipid peroxidation products have been known to induce cellular adaptive responses and enhance tolerance against subsequent oxidative stress through up-regulation of antioxidant compounds and enzymes. 24S-hydroxycholesterol (24SOHC) which is endogenously produced oxysterol in the brain plays an important role in maintaining brain cholesterol homeostasis. In this study, we evaluated adaptive responses induced by brain-specific oxysterol 24SOHC in human neuroblastoma SH-SY5Y cells. Cells treated with 24SOHC at sub-lethal concentrations showed significant reduction in cell death induced by subsequent treatment with 7-ketocholesterol (7KC) in both undifferentiated and retinoic aciddifferentiated SH-SY5Y cells. These adaptive responses were also induced by other oxysterols such as 25-hydroxycholesterol and 27-hydroxycholesterol which are known to be ligands of liver X receptor (LXR). Co-treatment of 24SOHC with 9-cis retinoic acid, a retinoid X receptor ligand, enhanced the adaptive responses. Knockdown of LXRβ by siRNA diminished the adaptive responses induced by 24SOHC almost completely. The treatment with 24SOHC induced the expression of LXR target genes, such as ATP-binding cassette transporter A1 (ABCA1) and G1 (ABCG1). The 24SOHC-induced adaptive responses were significantly attenuated by siRNA for ABCG1 but not by siRNA for ABCA1. Taken together, these results strongly suggest that 24SOHC at sub-lethal concentrations induces adaptive responses via transcriptional activation of LXR signaling pathway, thereby protecting neuronal cells from subsequent 7KC-induced cytotoxicity.
Journal of Radiation Research, 2016
The PI3K/AKT pathway is one of the most important signaling networks in human breast cancer, and ... more The PI3K/AKT pathway is one of the most important signaling networks in human breast cancer, and since it was potentially implicated in our preliminary investigations of radiation-induced rat mammary carcinomas, our aim here was to verify its role. We included mammary carcinomas induced by the chemical carcinogen 1-methyl-1-nitrosourea to determine whether any changes were radiation-specific. Most carcinomas from both groups showed activation of the PI3K/AKT pathway, but phosphorylation of AKT1 was often heterogeneous and only present in a minority of carcinoma cells. The negative pathway regulator Inpp4b was significantly downregulated in both groups, compared with in normal mammary tissue, and radiation-induced carcinomas also showed a significant decrease in Pten expression, while the chemically induced carcinomas showed a decrease in Pik3r1 and Pdk1. Significant upregulation of the positive regulators Erbb2 and Pik3ca was observed only in chemically induced carcinomas. However, ...
The paper describes online humorus communicatin behaviour
This article combines two approaches to analysing linguistic features in online communities that ... more This article combines two approaches to analysing linguistic features in online communities that are argued to complement one another: computer-mediated discourse analysis (Herring, 2004) and wakimae, or discernment (Ide, 1989). A structural analysis was conducted of four threads on two open-access Japanese bulletin board system (BBS) websites in terms of politeness, or honorifics, and possible determinants of particular linguistic characteristics were explored. The study finds that discussion topics are relevant to choices of politeness levels and that overall linguistic styles are linked to the norms of each community. On one of the BBS, linguistic features reveal widespread impoliteness, yet participants seem to share a strong sense of community. Watts' (2003) concept of contextually appropriate "politic" behaviour is invoked to reconcile the puzzling coexistence of impoliteness and sense of community. Language@Internet, 5, article 3 (2008) http://www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2008/1520
This article combines two approaches to analysing linguistic features in online communities that ... more This article combines two approaches to analysing linguistic features in online communities that are argued to complement one another: computer‑mediated discourse analysis (Herring 2004 and wakimae or discernment (Ide 1989. A structural analysis was conducted of four threads on two open‑access Japanese bulletin board system (BBS websites in terms of politeness or honorifics and possible determinants of particular linguistic characteristics
Uploads
Papers by Yukiko Nishimura