“Wha, what is this?”: Interactive elements in the representation of thoughts in Japanese manga (comics)

Language is commonly assumed to be inherently dialogic, but there are many situations where people use language primarily to address themselves, as in verbal thoughts and when speakers talk to themselves. While pragmatics focuses on language use in interactive situations, examining non-interactive language use can offer insight into how interaction shapes language. Given that verbal thoughts in comics are primarily indicated visually and not by linguistic markers, they provide unique examples of free direct thoughts. This study investigates interactive language use in comics by examining a corpus of popular Japanese comics, focusing on 1) parts of speech distribution and 2) the use of interjections and sentence final particles compared in represented thoughts and speech. Although interjections were more frequent in represented speech, within interjections, disfluency and fillers were significantly more frequent in represented thoughts. Similarly, although sentence final particles were more frequent in represented speech, the self-directed na and question ka more frequent in represented thoughts. Unlike previous findings on self-talk, other-directed yo, while more frequent in represented speech overall, represented a larger relative proportion than ne in thoughts. These interactive elements were often used in suspended interaction, functioning as fictive devices to move readers through the text and deepen characters. This also suggests that the concept of interaction itself should be reconsidered, to better encompass one-sided interaction such as that observed in represented thoughts.