Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-lnqnp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T07:11:19.387Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Discourse within a sentence: An exploration of postpositions in Japanese as an interactional resource

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 June 2004

MAKOTO HAYASHI
MAKOTO HAYASHI
Affiliation:
Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Foreign Languages Building, 2090-A, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, mhayashi@uiuc.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study explores a phenomenon in Japanese conversation that might be regarded as “discourse-within-a-sentence,” or interpolating a sequence of talk during ongoing sentence construction. It explicates the way in which Japanese speakers use postpositional particles as a resource to incorporate an element in a parenthetical sequence into the syntax of a sentence-in-progress. It is shown that the usability of postpositions for achieving discourse-within-a-sentence comes from the situated workings of postpositions used in a wider range of interactional contexts. Through a detailed examination of relevant instances from transcribed Japanese conversations, this study addresses such issues as (i) “sentences” in interaction as both a resource for, and an outcome of, intricate interactional work; (ii) postpositions as resources for retroactive transformations of turn-shapes in Japanese; and (iii) the relationship between typological features of the grammar of a language and forms of interactional practices.I wish to thank the following people for valuable comments at various stages in the development of this article: William Bright, Cecilia Ford, Barbara Fox, Noriko Fujii, Charles Goodwin, Jane Hill, Junko Mori, Tsuyoshi Ono, Jerome Packard, Hiroko Tanaka, and Sandra Thompson. Remaining shortcomings are my responsibility.

Keywords

Grammar and interactionconversation analysispostpositionstypologyJapanese
Type
Research Article
Information
Language in Society , Volume 33 , Issue 3 , July 2004 , pp. 343 - 376
Copyright
© 2004 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Auer, J. C. P. (1984). Referential problems in conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 8:627–48.Google Scholar
Chafe, Wallace (1992). Discourse: An overview. In William Bright (ed.), International encyclopedia of linguistics, 356–58. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chino, Naoko (1991). All about particles. Tokyo: Kodansha International.
Clark, Herbert H., & Wilkes-Gibbs, Deanna (1986). Referring as a collaborative process. Cognition 22:1–39.Google Scholar
Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth, & Selting, Margret (eds.) (1996). Prosody in conversation: Interactional studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ford, Cecilia E. (1993). Grammar in interaction: Adverbial clauses in American English conversations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ford, Cecilia E., & Fox, Barbara A. (1996). Interactional motivations for reference formulation: He had. This guy had, a beautiful, thirty-two O:lds. In Barbara Fox (ed.), Studies in anaphora, 145–68. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Ford, Cecilia E.; Fox, Barbara A.; & Thompson, Sandra A. (1996). Practices in the construction of turns: The ‘TCU’ revisited. Pragmatics 6:427–54.Google Scholar
Ford, Cecilia E., & Wagner, J. (eds.) (1996). Interaction-based studies of language. Special Issue of Pragmatics 6(3).Google Scholar
Fox, Barbara A. (1987). Discourse structure and anaphora: Written and Conversational English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fox, Barbara A.; Hayashi, Makoto; & Jasperson, Robert (1996). Resources and repair: A cross-linguistic study of syntax and repair. In Elinor Ochs et al. (eds.), Interaction and grammar, 185–237. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fox, Barbara A., & Jasperson, Robert (1995). A syntactic exploration of repair in English conversation. In Philip W. Davis (ed.), Alternative linguistics: Descriptive and theoretical modes, 77–134. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Fujii, Noriko, & Ono, Tsuyoshi (2000). The occurrence and non-occurrence of the Japanese direct object marker o in conversation. Studies in Language 24:1–39.Google Scholar
Goodwin, Charles. (1979). The interactive construction of a sentence in natural conversation. In George Psathas (ed.), Everyday language: Studies in ethnomethodology, 97–121. New York: Irvington.
Goodwin, Charles (1980). Restarts, pauses, and the achievement of a state of mutual gaze at turn-beginning. Sociological Inquiry 50:272–302.Google Scholar
Goodwin, Charles (1981). Conversational organization: Interaction between speakers and hearers. New York: Academic Press.
Goodwin, Charles (1984). Notes on story structure and the organization of participation. In J. Maxwell Atkinson &John Heritage (eds.), Structures of social action: Studies in conversation analysis, 225–46. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goodwin, Charles & Goodwin, Marjorie Harness (1987). Concurrent operations on talk: Notes on the interactive organization of assessments. IPrA Papers in Pragmatics 1:1–54.Google Scholar
Goodwin, Charles & Goodwin, Marjorie Harness (1992). Assessments and the construction of context. In Alessandro Duranti & Charles Goodwin (eds.), Rethinking context: Language as an interactive phenomenon, 151–89. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goodwin, Marjorie Harness (1980). Processes of mutual monitoring implicated in the production of description sequences. Sociological Inquiry 50:303–17.Google Scholar
Hattori, Shiro (1960). Gengogaku no hoohoo [Methods of linguistics]. Tokyo: Iwanami.
Hayashi, Makoto (2000). Practices in joint utterance construction in Japanese conversation. Dissertation, University of Colorado at Boulder.
Hayashi, Makoto (2001). Postposition-initiated utterances in Japanese conversation: An interactional account of a grammatical practice. In Margret Selting & Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen (eds.), Studies in interactional linguistics, 317–43. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Hayashi, Makoto (2003a). Joint utterance construction in Japanese conversation. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Hayashi, Makoto (2003b). Language and the body as resources for collaborative action: A study of word searches in Japanese conversation. Research on Language and Social Interaction 36:109–41.Google Scholar
Jasperson, Robert (2002). Some linguistic aspects of closure cut-off. In Cecilia Ford et al. (eds.), The language of turn and sequence, 257–86. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jefferson, Gail (1974). Error correction as an interactional resource. Language in Society 2:188–99.Google Scholar
Konoshima, Masatoshi (1966). Kokugo joshi no kenkyuu: Joshi-shi sobyoo [A study of particles in Japanese: A sketch of their history]. Tokyo: Oofuusha.
Kuno, Susumu (1973). The structure of the Japanese language. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Lerner, Gene H. (1991). On the syntax of sentences-in-progress. Language in Society 20:441–58.Google Scholar
Lerner, Gene H. (1996). On the ‘semi-permeable’ character of grammatical units in conversation: Conditional entry into the turn space of another speaker. In Elinor Ochs et al. (eds.), Interaction and grammar, 238–76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Martin, Samuel E. (1975). A reference grammar of Japanese. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Mazeland, Harrie (2000). Conversation analysis: The interactional construction of social reality. Paper presented at the EURESCO conference on Interactional Linguistics, Spa, Belgium.
Miyagawa, Shigeru (1989). Structure and case marking in Japanese. (Syntax and Semantics 22.) San Diego: Academic Press.
Mori, Junko (1999). Negotiating agreement and disagreement in Japanese: Connective expressions and turn construction. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Ochs, Elinor; Schegloff, Emanuel A; & Thompson, Sandra A. (eds.) (1996). Interaction and grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ono, Tsuyoshi, & Iwasaki, Shoichi (2002). Toward an understanding of ‘sentence’ in spoken Japanese discourse: Clause-combining and online mechanisms. In Kuniyoshi Kataoka &Sachiko Ide (eds.), Culture, interaction, and language, 103–31. Tokyo: Hituzi Syobo.
Ono, Tsuyoshi, & Thompson, Sandra A. (1995). What can conversation tell us about syntax? In Philip W. Davis (ed.), Alternative linguistics, 213–71. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Ono, Tsuyoshi & Thompson, Sandra A. (1996a). The dynamic nature of conceptual structure building: Evidence from conversation. In Adele Goldberg (ed.), Conceptual structure, discourse, and language, 391–99. Stanford: CSLI.
Ono, Tsuyoshi Thompson, Sandra A. (1996b). Interaction and syntax in the structure of conversational discourse. In E. Hovy &D. Scott (eds.), Discourse processing: An interdisciplinary perspective, 67–96. Heidelberg: Springer.
Ono, Tsuyoshi; Thompson, Sandra A.; & Suzuki, Ryoko (2000). The pragmatic nature of the so-called subject marker ga in Japanese. Discourse Studies 2:55–84.Google Scholar
Ono, Tsuyoshi; Yoshida, Eri; & Banno, Mieko (1998). It takes two to dance: The interactional determinants of NP intonation units with a marked rising intonation (hangimonkei) in Japanese conversation. In Noriko Akatsuka et al. (eds.), Japanese/Korean linguistics, vol. 7, 95–103. Stanford: CSLI.
Sacks, Harvey, & Schegloff, Emanuel A. (1979). Two preferences in the organization of reference to persons in conversation and their interaction. In George Psathas (ed.), Everyday language: Studies in ethnomethodology, 15–21. New York: Erlbaum.
Sacks, Harvey; Schegloff, Emanuel A.; & Jefferson, Gail (1974). A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language 50:696–735.Google Scholar
Schegloff, Emanuel A. (1979). The relevance of repair to syntax-for-conversation. In Talmy Givón (ed.), Syntax and semantics 12: Discourse and syntax, 261–86. New York: Academic Press.
Schegloff, Emanuel A. (1982). Discourse as an interactional achievement: some uses of ‘uh huh’ and other things that come between sentences. In Deborah Tannen (ed.), Georgetown University round table on languages and linguistics; Analyzing discourse: Text and talk, 71–93. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Schegloff, Emanuel A. (1988). Description in the social sciences I: Talk-in-interaction. IPrA Papers in Pragmatics 2:1–24.Google Scholar
Schegloff, Emanuel A. (1996a). Turn organization: One intersection of grammar and interaction. In Ochs et al. (eds.), Interaction and grammar, 52–133.
Schegloff, Emanuel A. (1996b). Some practices for referring to persons in talk-in-interaction: A partial sketch of a systematics. In Barbara Fox (ed.), Studies in anaphora, 437–85. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Schegloff, Emanuel A.; Jefferson, Gail; & Sacks, Harvey (1977). The preference for self-correction in the organization of repair in conversation. Language 53:361–82.Google Scholar
Schegloff, Emanuel A.; Ochs, Elinor; & Thompson, Sandra A. (1996). Introduction. In their Interaction and grammar, 1–51. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schegloff, Emanuel A., & Sacks, Harvey (1973). Opening up closings. Semiotica 7:289–327.Google Scholar
Schiffrin, Deborah (1994). Approaches to discourse. Cambridge, Mass. & Oxford: Blackwell.
Selting, Margret, & Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth (2001) (eds.). Studies in interactional linguistics. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Shibatani, Masayoshi (1990). The languages of Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sohn, Ho-min (1999). The Korean language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stubbs, Michael (1983). Discourse analysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Tanaka, Hiroko (1999). Turn-taking in Japanese conversation: A study in grammar and interaction. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Tanaka, Hiroko (2000). Turn-projection in Japanese talk-in-interaction. Research on Language and Social Interaction 33:1–38.Google Scholar
Tanaka, Hiroko (2001). The implementation of possible cognitive shifts in Japanese conversation: Complementisers as pivotal devices. In Selting &Couper-Kuhlen (eds.), Studies in interactional linguistics, 81–109.
Tsujimura, Natsuko (1996). An introduction to Japanese linguistics. Cambridge, Mass., & Oxford: Blackwell.
Vance, Timothy (1993). Are Japanese particles clitics? Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese 27:3–33.Google Scholar