Affect and letter-writing: Unconventional conventions in casual writing by young Japanese women

With special attention to the use of unconventional practices and pictorial signs in casual letter writing, this article shows how young Japanese women effectively exploit affect-laden shape, form, and function in order to establish intimate and solidary relationships. They rely on both conventional and unconventional aspects of Japanese orthography, encoding affect specific to the given context and merging spoken with written modes of self-representation. In so doing, they seem to draw on diverse "frames" of written language, and to manipulate symbolic means of association and integration for achieving reciprocity. These features not only provide the basis for reciprocity, but may also suggest a new mode of literacy caused by social change. (Writing, literacy, affect, Japanese, pictorial signs, letter-writing)* Increasingly attracting linguists' attention is the interface between language and affect, which has been a neglected area of investigation in linguistics. As Irvine 1990 summarizes, many linguists formerly assumed that affectivity only pertains to the individual and is largely a property of parole rather than of langue. They assumed also that the affective function is a non-referential dimension of language. Thus the affective function was not part of linguistic competence and was marginal to linguistic study. This view was later criticized, and the concept of competence was reasonably adjusted to include "poetic" functions (Jakobson 1960, Hymes 1966) and non-referential functions of communication (Silverstein 1976) into the study of language. Recently, even more linguists have come to appreciate the grammatical realization of affect in language. Data suggest that discourse is saturated with affect-carrying devices such as word order, verb voice, pronominal reference, mood, tense/aspect, and case/number/gender/animacy marking (Ochs & Schieffelin 1989). Sapir (1921:38-41) and Jakobson (1960, 1990:99-102) both claimed that affect and emotion are fundamental elements of human life, and are mani? 1997 Cambridge University Press 0047-4045/97 $7.50 + .10 103 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.191 on Tue, 11 Oct 2016 05:21:12 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

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