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Abstract
Previous research has shown that attentiveness (kikubari) is a significant aspect of politeness in Japanese. The aim of this paper is to expand on earlier research on attentiveness by using Twitter data and examine how Japanese lay people understand and/or evaluate attentiveness and how attentiveness manifests politeness. The data for this study were 600 Japanese tweets which contain attentiveness. They were coded based on analysis of the content and analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively. The results show that Japanese lay people evaluate attentiveness positively and that they think attentiveness is important in most cases. These results reflect a commonly held belief in Japanese culture, namely that attentiveness is a virtue. In some posts, the demonstrators of attentiveness appeared to infer the needs of the potential recipients and made pre-emptive offers, as they had known the situations of the potential recipients. Attentiveness in such posts coincides with the definition of attentiveness in previous research. In some other posts, attentiveness is used in the sense of consideration, which was included in the conceptualisation of politeness in Japanese. These results confirmed earlier findings and further our understanding of them through concrete examples from Twitter.

AbstractWhile politeness has been researched mainly from the perspectives of face and identity, this conceptual paper explores another understanding of politeness through the consideration of attentiveness, namely, a demonstrator's pre-emptive responses to a recipient's verbal or non-verbal cues or situations surrounding a recipient and a demonstrator, which takes the form of offering. In this paper, it is suggested that politeness can be construed in relation to the heart; and that behavioral (non-linguistic) politeness, an understudied area in the field, should be taken into account in politeness research. With the development of interpersonal pragmatics, there has been a growing need to investigate interpersonal relationships, and great importance is placed on evaluation in the discursive approach. As attentiveness is an interpersonal notion, which involves evaluation, the consideration of attentiveness meets these demands. In the present paper, the concept of attentiveness is clarified and it is shown how attentiveness works by presenting the process of demonstration and evaluation of attentiveness.

AbstractThis paper overviews the phenomenon of the meta-conventionalisation of interpersonal practices in the context of computer-mediated communication. The term 'meta-conventionalisation' refers to the coding of the conventional interpersonal practices of a particular group, or various groups, in the form of entertainment as films and novels. The word 'meta' refers to the fact that such pieces of artwork narrate a set of conventional practices from a quasi-observer point of view, without involving their audience in these practices as language users – in this sense they are different from good practice guides (typically described as 'netiquette, in the context of e-pragmatics), which assume that readers will internalise the practices they describe. Meta-conventionalisation has been an understudied phenomenon, in spite of representing an important aspect of our daily lives. We illustrate how this phenomenon operates by examining a Japanese case study: a popular novel which features the online interactions of a group of otaku, that is, asocial young people who lock themselves up and interact in highly specific ways.