This monograph contains the first systematic investigation of the Japanese ‘dative subject’ construction across time and space. It demonstrates that, in order to capture what speakers/writers know about how to put an utterance or a clause together, it is necessary to pay attention to what they do in actual language use and in different discourse types. The work also shows the importance of diachronic perspectives to help us better understand the ways in which a particular grammatical structure is represented synchronically. By utilizing modern Japanese conversation, contemporary Japanese novels, and a pre-modern and modern Japanese literature corpus, the study highlights the role of ‘dative subjects’ at the semantic and discourse-pragmatic levels. Specifically, it demonstrates that what has been considered to be a most ‘grammatical’ aspect of Japanese actually turns out to be rather pragmatically oriented.

This monograph provides a micro-analytic description of the structure and communicative use of syntactic pivot constructions in German. Using the methodology of Conversation Analysis, this work shows that pivots emerge in interaction in response to local communicative needs.Exclusively found in spoken German, pivots allow a speaker to extend an utterance beyond a possible completion point in a syntactically and prosodically unobtrusive way. Speakers utilize this basic property to promote context-specific actions: managing boundaries of speakership, bridging sequential and topical junctures, and dealing with different types of interactional trouble.Through a close examination of syntactic pivots as an interactional resource, this work shows that spoken linguistic structures can only be fully understood if we acknowledge the temporality of language and view grammar as usage-based and negotiable. This book thus contributes to a growing body of research at the intersection of grammar and interaction.

This volume, grounded on usage-based models of language, is an edited collection of empirical research examining how cognitive linguistics can advance Japanese pedagogy. Each chapter presents an acquisition or classroom study which focuses on challenging features and leads instructors and researchers into new realms of analysis by showing innovative views and practices resulting in better understanding and improved L2 learning of Japanese.

This book sheds new light on Appositive Relative Clauses (ARCs), a structure that is generally studied from a merely syntactic point of view, in opposition to Determinative (or Restrictive) Relative Clauses (DRCs). In this volume, ARCs are examined from a discourse/pragmatic point of view, independently of DRCs, in order to provide a positive definition of the structure. After a presentation of the morphosyntactic, semantic and pragmatic characteristics of ARCs, a taxonomy of their functions in discourse is established for both written and spoken English based on the results of a corpus-based investigation. Constraints are then defined within an information-packaging approach to syntactic structures to show why speakers choose ARCs over other competing allostructures, i.e. syntactic structures that fulfil similar discourse functions (e.g. nominal appositives, independent clauses, adverbials, noun premodifiers, topicalization). The end result is a deeper understanding of the richness of ARCs in their natural contexts of use.

Prosody is constitutive for spoken interaction. In more than 25 years, its study has grown into a full-fledged and very productive field with a sound catalogue of research methods and principles. This volume presents the state of the art, illustrates current research trends and uncovers potential directions for future research. It will therefore be of major interest to everyone studying spoken interaction. The collection brings together an impressive range of internationally renowned scholars from different, yet closely related and compatible research traditions which have made a significant contribution to the field. They cover issues such as the units of language, the contextualization of actions and activities, conversational modalities and genres, the display of affect and emotion, the multimodality of interaction, language acquisition and aphasia. All contributions are based on empirical, audio- and/or video-recorded data of natural talk-in-interaction, including languages such as English, German and Japanese. The methodologies employed come from Ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics.

This volume represents the first comprehensive work on Japanese clause structure conducted within the framework of Cognitive Grammar. The author proposes schematic conceptual structures for the major constructions in the language and defines Japanese case marking and grammatical relations in purely conceptual terms. The work thus makes a convincing case for the conceptual basis of grammar, thereby constituting a strong argument against the autonomy of syntax hypothesis of Generative Grammar. The volume should be of interest to any researcher wishing to know how Cognitive Grammar, whose primary focus has been on the non-syntactic aspects of language, can explain the clausal structure of a given language in a detailed, comprehensive, yet unifying manner. In addition to its theoretical findings, the volume contains a number of revealing analyses and interpretations of Japanese data, which should be of great interest to all Japanese linguists, irrespective of their theoretical persuasions.