Published papers

© John Benjamins Publishing Company This paper focuses on 'clause', a celebrated structural unit in linguistics, by comparing Finnish and Japanese, two languages which are genetically, typologically, and areally distinct from each other and from English, the language on the basis of which this structural unit has been most typically discussed. We first examine how structural units including the clause have been discussed in the literature on Finnish and Japanese. We will then examine the reality of the clause in everyday talk in these languages quantitatively and qualitatively; in our qualitative analysis, we focus in particular on what units are oriented to by conversational participants. The current study suggests that the degree of grammaticization of the clause varies crosslinguistically and questions the central theoretical status accorded to this structural unit.

© 2017 Elsevier B.V. A number of recent studies (Wray, 2008; Corrigan et al., 2009; Bybee, 2010; Tanabe et al., 2014) have highlighted the formulaic nature of actual language use. The present paper is part of our larger project which examines the mechanism of formulaicity observed in Japanese conversation and seeks its implications for the nature of human language in general. Japanese is known for its extensive ‘backchanneling’ behavior (e.g., Maynard, 1986, 1987; Clancy et al., 1996; Iwasaki, 1997; Nagata, 2004; Ohama, 2006) and presents a case of florescence (Chafe, 2000) by boasting an extensive repertoire of diverse expressions used for such a purpose. We report on a previously unrecognized type of expression forming part of the group: frequently used verbs with general meanings such as aru ‘exist’ iru ‘exist’ yaru ‘do’ kuru ‘come’ and wakaru ‘understand’ appear to be grammaticized as reactive tokens. We will examine these formulas in context paying attention to their prosody, structure, semantics, and function. Specifically, we find these verbs standing on their own or in a reduplicated form as a response to the prior talk. Often there is no referent in the context that can be understood as the argument of the verbs. These characteristics suggest their status as reactive tokens.

This article explores how participants respond to compliments in Japanese everyday interactions. Even though compliments and responses (C-R) make a well-established format that contains a relatively high degree of fixedness and social and temporal restrictions, examinations of video-recorded Japanese conversation data show that a compliment recipient (Rt) handles a compliment delivered by a compliment giver (Gv) in a range of creative uses of language and the body. Focusing on negative responses that often start with iyaiya "no no", we show that, in addition to formulaic responses, an Rt may add creative comments and/or perform embodied actions to partially accept the compliment or shift the perspective of the compliment. In short, Japanese speakers' responses to compliments are much more creative and nuanced than previously assumed.

It has been well established that Japanese has one type of cleft construction. This understanding was reached mostly through the examination of single Japanese sentences, constructed based on (pseudo-)cleft examples in English. We identify another type of cleft in Japanese based on the examination of everyday conversation data. This construction can be aptly considered a pseudo-cleft as it involves the interrogative pronoun nani ‘what’. Both structurally and functionally, it behaves similarly to pseudo-clefts in several other languages and to the Japanese traditional cleft, as characterized in recent conversation-based studies.

This paper analyzes the so-called aspectual suffix -CHAU used by a Japanese mother (M) to her two-year-old son (Y). -CHAU, a suffix expressing completion of a situation, comes from -TE-SHIMAU, meaning 'put away', and reflects the speaker's negative affect upon completion of certain events or actions. The data came from the transcripts of audio-recorded conversational interactions between one mother-child pair. Verbs inflected with -CHAU carry negative connotations involving damage or physical harm to an entity, while most verbs not inflected with -CHAU do not. Thus, -CHAU in M's speech conveys the speaker's negative attitude toward completion of a situation, rather than mere marking of completion. The earliest meaning of -CHAU shown to Y by his mother is affective, presenting the completion of a particular action or event as negative, not just completed. Indeed, 85% of M's use of -CHAU is for socialization of the child's behavior: teaching Y how to treat toys, eat, handle food, and so on. These targets of socialization are types of knowledge that are important for a child's physical and social well-being. It is shown that the framework of language socialization sheds new light on the analysis of the acquisition of -CHAU. © 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

In a reenactment, a speaker re-presents or depicts a previously occurring event, often dramatically. In this article we examine the role of gaze in reenactments in conversations from Japanese and American English. Following Goodwin in viewing a reenacted story as ‘a multi-modal, multi-party field of activity’, we show how tellers’ and recipients’ gaze during reenactments is deployed to achieve specific interactional ends. We argue that there are two layers of activities involved in doing reenacting – a) the habitat of the original event; b) the habitat of the reenacting event, including the dynamics of gaining appreciative recipiency – and show how they are interwoven in the joint production of a reenactment.

This paper investigates 'Reactive Tokens' in Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, and English. Our definition of 'Reactive Token' (= 'RT') is 'a short utterance produced by an interlocutor who is playing a listener's role during the other interlocutor's speakership'. That is, Reactive Tokens will normally not disrupt the primary speaker's speakership, and do not in themselves claim the floor. Using corpora of conversational interactions from each of the three languages of our study, we distinguish among several types of RTs, and show that the three languages differ in terms of the types of RTs favored, the frequency with which RTs are used in conversation, and the way in which speakers distribute their RTs across conversational units.

Since the inception of modern approaches to grammar, Japanese ga has been treated as a marker indicating the grammatical relation ‘subject.’ If this is an accurate characterization of ga, then we would expect ga to occur to mark a grammatical category consisting of ‘A’ (transitive subject) and ‘S’ (intransitive subject) (Comrie, 1978; Dixon, 1979). Our examination of the contexts in which ga is actually used in everyday Japanese conversations shows that this expectation is not borne out. Our findings suggest that it is not appropriate to describe ga in terms of a grammatical relation such as ‘subject’, and that ga may be much less a grammatical marker than a discourse-pragmatic one. © 2000, SAGE Publications. All rights reserved.

A systematic investigation into the first large scale Japanese conversation corpus reveals that repeated verbs (RVs) occurring in the response position tend to involve frequently used verbs such as aru 'to exist' and chigau 'to differ' (e.g., aru aru aru). Further, longer RVs, those involving more repetition, are even more likely to occur with frequent verbs. In RVs, we find the verb having lost some of its lexical meaning and phonological substance (e.g., chigau > chiga). RVs in fact behave more like pragmatic particles functioning as reactive tokens, i.e., short responses interjected by non-main speakers. RVs as reactive tokens are most clearly observed when they are used together with standard reactive tokens such as hai hai hai hai 'yes, yes, yes, yes', so(o) so(o) so(o) 'yes, yes, yes', and (i)ya (i)ya (i)ya 'no, no, no', which also exhibit repetition and phonological reduction. Verb repetition is thus better understood as a template to turn verbs into reactive tokens.

is widely accepted that Japanese is a strict verb-final language. However, r examination of conversational data reveals cases where elements are pressed after the predicate. These exceptions can be divided into two pes. The first type involves a break in intonation between the predicate id the following element or elements. In this type, after the predicate is pressed, a certain element (or elements) is expressed for such purposes further specification and repair. In the second type, the predicate and the llowing element or elements are expressed within one intonation contour. his type is further divided into two subtypes: The discourse-pragmatic type id the emotive type. In the discourse-pragmatic type, the element or eleents after the predicate serve a certain discourse-pragmatic function. These ements include adverbials, conjunctions and pronouns, and either indicate e speaker's stance toward the proposition or referent or create discourse) hesiveness. In the emotive type, an adjectival or nominal predicate which expresses such feelings as surprise and disgust is followed by a demonstrative. It is accompanied by an emotional intonation pattern. In this subtype, non-canonical order seems to be preferred over canonical order. The intonational and distributional characteristics of the two subtypes thus suggest that the non-canonical word order is becoming grammaticized. © 1992, Walter de Gruyter.

This article discusses the process of (inter)subjectification in grammatical constructions including tte, which is known as the quotative complementizer in present-day Japanese. About 170 instances of tte constructions that appeared in the conversational data spanning over 200 years are analyzed, focusing on three major types of constructions: the quotative tte construction, the topic-introducing construction, and the constructions with tte as utterance-final pragmatic particles. There are morphosyntactic changes concomitant to the process of (inter)subjectification; for example, the quality of the "quoted" element preceding tte has been extended to include less utterance-like materials. In addition, the "main" verb iu 'say' that is associated with the quotative tte has lost its verbal characteristics in the topic construction and disappears in the utterance-final particle construction. Subjectification, as well as intersubjectification, is observed locally in each position: after the quoted element, after the topic noun, and at the utterance-final position. © John Benjamins Publishing Company.

The category of ‘adverbial clause’ seems to be relatively well-justified for understanding the grammar of the everyday spoken languages of Europe, although fuzzy boundaries are generally recognized. In this paper, we explore whether the category ‘adverbial clause’ is useful for understanding conversational Japanese by considering the behavior of the three most frequent clause connectors, kara ‘because/so’, kedo ‘but’, and -tara ‘if’. Noting the reliance of this category on a biclausal ‘main’ vs. ‘dependent’ distinction, we consider four frequent patterns in our data which challenge the advisability of positing ‘adverbial clause’ for the grammar of this language: a) the ‘main’ clause is structurally ‘less than’ a main clause; b) the ‘main clause’ is missing; c) the alleged ‘adverbial clause’ or the alleged ‘main clause’, or the combination, consists of fixed expressions; d) the clause combination typically consists of more than two clauses. We conclude that the notion of ‘adverbial clause’ needs to be augmented with accounts of these robust clause combining patterns.