This book explores how speakers of Japanese organize their messages into coherent units as they jointly and interactively construct conversational discourse. Specifically, it investigates the syntactic, informational, and functional structures of intonation units (IUs) as basic units of discourse… read more
This paper explores an emerging Brazilian Portuguese koiné spoken among Brazilian-dominant Latin American immigrants in Japan’s Greater Tokyo Area. It examines Strong-R (onset /r/) realizations by 79 speakers in the context of dialect and language contact within the diasporic setting. The… read more
This paper reports results from a reinvestigation of multilingualism in postcolonial Palau, conducted twenty years after the first study. The first-ever ethnographic language survey conducted in 1997–1998 highlighted the diglossic nature of Palau where English replaced Japanese as the ‘high’… read more
This paper examines the preferred syntactic structure of the idea-conveying substantive “intonation unit” (IU) in conversational Japanese. It was found that (a) the clause is the syntactic exponent of the Japanese substantive IU; (b) the clauses are overwhelmingly single-IU clauses rather than… read more
This paper examines informal face-to-face, two-party conversations in Japanese in order to explore the relationship between intonation units and functional composition. Specifically, the present study investigates the preferred functional structure of substantive intonation units that convey ideas… read more
