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Dealing with cultural diversity is one of the key challenges in contemporary societies, with Japan being no exception. However, relatively little is known about how minority group members are viewed by members of the dominant group. The current paper presents a study that evaluated three hypotheses that are related to these issues with a survey of 210 Japanese adult participants. The study also examines moderating roles of national identities in acculturation expectations and psychological functioning in the dominant group. Perceived security about the society in terms of national culture, and personal conditions in a multicultural society predict the most tolerant form of acculturation expectation. This association is mediated by one's multicultural ideology. Although acculturation expectations are not predictive of psychological functioning, particular national identity (i.e., internationalism) alleviates the negative effect of the closest form of expectation (exclusion) on psychological problems. The study implies the need for analysis on culture-specific constructs of multicultural society in perceptions and attitudes in the dominant group in Japanese society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the received view, connective particles are characterised as "bound grammatical markers" that connect two clauses into a 'sentence' (Matsumoto, Yo 1988: 345). As Fukushima (2005) points out though, these conjunctions have other functions that go beyond intra-sentential usage. Utterance-final conjunctive particles have been analysed thus far, for the most part, as a type of (clausal) ellipsis or as particles that give rise to various pragmatic effects. In this paper, it is suggested that an approach to utterance-final conjunctive particles that is grounded in the notion of implicature may offer a complementary perspective on this phenomenon. The notions of "(im)politeness implicature" and "interactional implicature" are utilised in order to discuss how utterance-final conjunctive particles may trigger inferences leading to various interpersonal and interactional effects. By carefully analysing the projection and uptake of these implicatures apparent in the sequential development of interpretings conjointly co-constituted in Japanese conversation, it is argued that the analysts' and participants' perspectives can be better reconciled to avoid the imposition of an analysis by the researcher which is not contingently relevant to those participants. It is argued that through such an analysis the manner in which linguistic and communicative perspectives on implicature can complement one another can be explored more fully. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]