This book focuses on how participants in Japanese conversation negotiate and achieve joint courses of action within a single turn at talk. Using the methodology of Conversation Analysis as a central framework, this book describes in detail the structures and procedures used by Japanese speakers to jointly produce a coherent grammatical unit-in-progress, and explores the range of social actions that speakers accomplish by employing that practice. This study is part of a larger project intended to investigate how humans achieve intricate coordination of their behavior with that of co-participants in everyday social encounters and how language plays a constitutive part in making such micro-level social coordination possible. Through a close examination of joint utterance construction in Japanese, this book contributes to a growing body of research into the mutual influence between the grammatical organization of language and the organization of situated human conduct in social interaction.
Presenting a comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of theoretical and descriptive research in the field, The Handbook of Conversation Analysis brings together contributions by leading international experts to provide an invaluable information resource and reference for scholars of social interaction across the areas of conversation analysis, discourse analysis, linguistic anthropology, interpersonal communication, discursive psychology and sociolinguistics. Ideal as an introduction to the field for upper level undergraduates and as an in-depth review of the latest developments for graduate level students and established scholars Five sections outline the history and theory, methods, fundamental concepts, and core contexts in the study of conversation, as well as topics central to conversation analysis Written by international conversation analysis experts, the book covers a wide range of topics and disciplines, from reviewing underlying structures of conversation, to describing conversation analysis' relationship to anthropology, communication, linguistics, psychology, and sociology
Combining the main findings, methods and analytic techniques of this central approach to language and social interaction, along with real-life examples and step-by-step explanations, Conversation Analysis is the ideal student guide to the field. Introduces the main findings, methods and analytic techniques of conversation analysis (CA) – a growing interdisciplinary field exploring language and social interaction Provides an engaging historical overview of the field, along with detailed coverage of the key findings in each area of CA and a guide to current research Examines the way talk is composed, and how conversation structures highlight aspects of human behavior Focuses on the most important domains of organization in conversation, including turn-taking, action sequencing, repair, stories, openings and closings, and the effect of context Includes real-life examples and step-by-step explanations, making it an ideal guide for students navigating this growing field
The core use of language is in face-to-face conversation. This is characterized by rapid turn-taking. This turn-taking poses a number central puzzles for the psychology of language. Consider, for example, that in large corpora the gap between turns is on the order of 100 to 300 ms, but the latencies involved in language production require minimally between 600 ms (for a single word) or 1500 ms (for as simple sentence). This implies that participants in conversation are predicting the ends of the incoming turn and preparing in advance. But how is this done? What aspects of this prediction are done when? What happens when the prediction is wrong? What stops participants coming in too early? If the system is running on prediction, why is there consistently a mode of 100 to 300 ms in response time? The timing puzzle raises further puzzles: it seems that comprehension must run parallel with the preparation for production, but it has been presumed that there are strict cognitive limitations on more than one central process running at a time. How is this bottleneck overcome? Far from being 'easy' as some psychologists have suggested, conversation may be one of the most demanding cognitive tasks in our everyday lives. Further questions naturally arise: how do children learn to master this demanding task, and what is the developmental trajectory in this domain? Research shows that aspects of turn-taking, such as its timing, are remarkably stable across languages and cultures, but the word order of languages varies enormously. How then does prediction of the incoming turn work when the verb (often the informational nugget in a clause) is at the end? Conversely, how can production work fast enough in languages that have the verb at the beginning, thereby requiring early planning of the whole clause? What happens when one changes modality, as in sign languages – with the loss of channel constraints is turn-taking much freer? And what about face-to-face communication amongst hearing individuals – do gestures, gaze, and other body behaviors facilitate turn-taking? One can also ask the phylogenetic question: how did such a system evolve? There seem to be parallels (analogies) in duetting bird species, and in a variety of monkey species, but there is little evidence of anything like this among the great apes. All this constitutes a neglected set of problems at the heart of the psychology of language and of the language sciences. This Research Topic contributes to advancing our understanding of these problems by summarizing recent work from psycholinguists, developmental psychologists, students of dialog and conversation analysis, linguists, phoneticians, and comparative ethologists.
Long denigrated as dialects of Japanese, the Ryukyuan languages are today recognized as languages in their own right. However, speakers of Ryukyuan languages have suffered from stigmatization, oppressive language policies and domination from outside the Ryukyu Archipelago. As a result, the Ryukyuan languages are now severely endangered. This volume depicts, roughly in chronological order, aspects which have led to the language crisis in the Ryukyus today. Taking account of these factors is important because endangered languages can only be maintained and revitalized on the basis of a comprehensive understanding of why these languages became endangered in the first place. The chapters of this book have been written by leading experts in Ryukyuan sociolinguistics and the scope encompasses the entire field. It sheds light on the dark side of language modernization, on a misplaced obsession with monolingualism, and on Japan’s difficulties in surmounting its invented self-image.
One major feature of conversation is that people take turns to speak. Based on audio and video recordings of naturally-occurring Mandarin conversation, this book explores the role of syntax, prosody, body movements as well as their interplay in turn organization in the temporal unfolding of action and interaction. Adopting the methodology of interactional linguistics, this book offers a fine-grained analysis of the three multimodal resources and the sequential environments in which they appear. It demonstrates that syntax, prosody and body movements not only converge but also diverge in projecting possible turn completion. As one of the few systematic studies of multimodality in Mandarin interaction, this book will be of interest to researchers in Chinese linguistics, interactional linguistics, conversation analysis, and multimodal analysis.
"Reviewing recent findings on linguistic practices used in turn construction and turn taking, repair, action formation and ascription, sequence and topic organization, the book examines the way linguistic units of varying size - sentences, clauses, phrases, clause combinations, particles - are mobilized for the implementation of specific actions in talk-in-interaction. A final chapter discusses the implications of an interactional perspective for our understanding of language as well as its variation, diversity, and universality. Supplementary online chapters explore additional topics such as the linguistic organization of preference, stance, footing, and storytelling, as well as the use of prosody and phonetics, and further practices with language"--
Obana and Haugh question the extent to which commonly accepted theories in pragmatics can readily explain sociopragmatic phenomena in Japanese. Studies of Japanese in pragmatics have often challenged the cross-linguistic relevance of dominant theories. However, they have also inadvertently perpetuated stereotypes about the Japanese. It is often been assumed, for instance, that Japanese people are less strategic, more polite and more reliant on tacit forms of communication than speakers of other languages. But the Japanese are not as polite as one might think. The aim of this book is thus to question those folk assumptions around politeness, impoliteness, irony and indirectness while at the same time emphasizing that close examination of sociopragmatic phenomena in Japanese yields important empirical insights that combat common theoretical assumptions in pragmatics. The content is structured in three parts, in which the authors highlight a key building block of a theory of sociopragmatics. Part I focuses on indexing through the lens of chapters on honorifics, routine formula and politeness strategies. Part II focuses on evaluating through the lens of chapters on giving/receiving expressions and honorific irony. Finally, Part III focuses on relating through the lens of chapters on joint utterances and off record requests. Throughout the chapters the authors draw attention to ways in which these three dimensions are invariably intertwined in various ways. This book is not simply a collection of studies that promotes our understanding of the sociopragmatics of a particular language, but goes deeper and challenges what many have taken for granted in pragmatics. It proposes a framework for exploring sociopragmatic phenomena, building on the key sociopragmatic axes of indexing, evaluating and relating, and offers fresh new perspectives on time-honoured phenomena in pragmatics. It will interest scholars and postgraduate students in pragmatics, particularly those specializing in: politeness, impoliteness, indirectness and irony. The book explains what Japanese terms mean, and all the Japanese examples are morphologically-glossed. Therefore, teachers (and advanced learners) of Japanese at all levels will benefit from the book as it will enrich their knowledge of the Japanese language.
This book meets the demands of scholars of Chinese linguistics as well as researchers on multimodality from a cross-linguistic and comparative perspective. It sheds new light on the traditional study of Chinese discourse and grammar. The volume brings together leading scholars working on the state-of-the-art research on this topic from all over the world, contributing to the understanding of the multimodal nature of human interaction at large.
