Edited by Tsuyoshi Ono, Ritva Laury and Ryoko Suzuki
The chapters in this volume focus on how we might understand the concept of ‘unit’ in human languages. It is an analytical notion that has been widely adopted by linguists of various theoretical and applied orientations but has recently been critically examined by both typologically oriented and… read more
This volume concerns the structure and use of fixed expressions in a range of typologically, genetically and areally distinct languages. The chapters consider the use contexts of fixed expressions, at the same time taking seriously the need to account for their structural aspects. Formulaicity is… read more
The ‘NP’ is one of the least controversial grammatical units that linguists work with. The NP is often assumed to be universal, and appears to be robust cross-linguistically (compared to ‘VP’ or even ‘clause’) in that it can be manipulated in argument positions in constructed examples. Furthermore,… read more
This volume brings together papers that take usage-based approaches to study the nature of human language, with a focus on the grammar of Japanese. The 12 chapters provide a rich array of data and methodologies, with topics ranging from phonology, modality, and grammatical morphemes, to sentential… read more
This innovative and interdisciplinary book on style shifting in Japanese brings together a wide range of perspectives and methodologies—including discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics, and functional linguistics—to look at a variety of types of style shifting in both spoken… read more
We focus on (a) the indeterminacy of reference, i.e., noun phrases which are described as having a ‘given’, ‘old’ or ‘definite’ referent, where that referent is unspecified; (b) the ways in which speakers shift reference between categorial and specific designations. The data reveal that talk… read more
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… read more
This chapter examines the phenomenon called ‘zero anaphora’ in Japanese where syntactic arguments, thought to be projected by the predicates, are assumed to be deleted yet their referents are still tracked. A close inspection of representative narrative and interactive segments reveals that… read more
Our examination of Japanese everyday conversation reveals that a majority of candidate NPs cannot be established as NPs based on traditional criteria, i.e., marking by particles and modification, since they are generally unmarked and unmodified. We examine these cases to reveal the difficulty of… read more
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… read more
‘Negative scope’ concerns what it is that is negated in an utterance with a negative morpheme. With English and Japanese conversational data, we show that for an English speaker, calculating negative scope requires that recipients incrementally keep track of all the material in the clause that… read more
Our paper concerns the grammar of clause combining in Finnish and Japanese conversation. We consider the patterns of clause combining in our data and focus on the verbal and non-verbal cues which allow participants to determine whether, after the end of a clause-sized unit, the turn will end or… read more
Everyone brings with them a particular set of contextualization to interaction. After several years of working on the Ikema dialect of Miyako Ryukyuan, we are finally realizing that our very presence as shinshii/shiishii ‘masters’ is one of the major factors encouraging Ikema people to use Japanese. read more
Japanese adjectives have received a fair amount of attention for their intriguing morphological and diachronic properties. Adjectives have also been discussed in the typological literature, largely in terms of their status as a lexical category vis-à-vis nouns and verbs. Rather little research has… read more
This study examines naturally occurring conversations with regard to the syntactic and semantic/pragmatic properties of Japanese quotative particle tte in five different usages and argues that these usages constitute subcategories of the particle tte. Our analysis demonstrates complex and creative… read more
This cross-linguistic study focuses on ways in which conversationalists speak beyond a point of possible turn completion in conversation, specifically on turn extensions which are grammatically dependent, backward-looking and extend the prior action. It argues that further distinctions can be made… read more
A new area of research called Interactional Linguistics highlights linguistic structure in relation to naturally occurring interaction and is characterized by its cross-linguistic orientation. As a contribution to this new area of research, the present volume is a collection of papers with a… read more
Although in written Japanese grammatical relations such as subject and object are marked by postpositional particles, in informal conversation they may occur without any particles. This paper examines the occurrence and non-occurrence of the direct object marker o in spontaneous informal… read more
