This book focuses on how participants in Japanese conversation negotiate and achieve joint courses of action within a single turn at talk. Using the methodology of Conversation Analysis as a central framework, this book describes in detail the structures and procedures used by Japanese speakers to jointly produce a coherent grammatical unit-in-progress, and explores the range of social actions that speakers accomplish by employing that practice. This study is part of a larger project intended to investigate how humans achieve intricate coordination of their behavior with that of co-participants in everyday social encounters and how language plays a constitutive part in making such micro-level social coordination possible. Through a close examination of joint utterance construction in Japanese, this book contributes to a growing body of research into the mutual influence between the grammatical organization of language and the organization of situated human conduct in social interaction.

Presenting a comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of theoretical and descriptive research in the field, The Handbook of Conversation Analysis brings together contributions by leading international experts to provide an invaluable information resource and reference for scholars of social interaction across the areas of conversation analysis, discourse analysis, linguistic anthropology, interpersonal communication, discursive psychology and sociolinguistics. Ideal as an introduction to the field for upper level undergraduates and as an in-depth review of the latest developments for graduate level students and established scholars Five sections outline the history and theory, methods, fundamental concepts, and core contexts in the study of conversation, as well as topics central to conversation analysis Written by international conversation analysis experts, the book covers a wide range of topics and disciplines, from reviewing underlying structures of conversation, to describing conversation analysis' relationship to anthropology, communication, linguistics, psychology, and sociology

Combining the main findings, methods and analytic techniques of this central approach to language and social interaction, along with real-life examples and step-by-step explanations, Conversation Analysis is the ideal student guide to the field. Introduces the main findings, methods and analytic techniques of conversation analysis (CA) – a growing interdisciplinary field exploring language and social interaction Provides an engaging historical overview of the field, along with detailed coverage of the key findings in each area of CA and a guide to current research Examines the way talk is composed, and how conversation structures highlight aspects of human behavior Focuses on the most important domains of organization in conversation, including turn-taking, action sequencing, repair, stories, openings and closings, and the effect of context Includes real-life examples and step-by-step explanations, making it an ideal guide for students navigating this growing field

The core use of language is in face-to-face conversation. This is characterized by rapid turn-taking. This turn-taking poses a number central puzzles for the psychology of language. Consider, for example, that in large corpora the gap between turns is on the order of 100 to 300 ms, but the latencies involved in language production require minimally between 600 ms (for a single word) or 1500 ms (for as simple sentence). This implies that participants in conversation are predicting the ends of the incoming turn and preparing in advance. But how is this done? What aspects of this prediction are done when? What happens when the prediction is wrong? What stops participants coming in too early? If the system is running on prediction, why is there consistently a mode of 100 to 300 ms in response time? The timing puzzle raises further puzzles: it seems that comprehension must run parallel with the preparation for production, but it has been presumed that there are strict cognitive limitations on more than one central process running at a time. How is this bottleneck overcome? Far from being 'easy' as some psychologists have suggested, conversation may be one of the most demanding cognitive tasks in our everyday lives. Further questions naturally arise: how do children learn to master this demanding task, and what is the developmental trajectory in this domain? Research shows that aspects of turn-taking, such as its timing, are remarkably stable across languages and cultures, but the word order of languages varies enormously. How then does prediction of the incoming turn work when the verb (often the informational nugget in a clause) is at the end? Conversely, how can production work fast enough in languages that have the verb at the beginning, thereby requiring early planning of the whole clause? What happens when one changes modality, as in sign languages – with the loss of channel constraints is turn-taking much freer? And what about face-to-face communication amongst hearing individuals – do gestures, gaze, and other body behaviors facilitate turn-taking? One can also ask the phylogenetic question: how did such a system evolve? There seem to be parallels (analogies) in duetting bird species, and in a variety of monkey species, but there is little evidence of anything like this among the great apes. All this constitutes a neglected set of problems at the heart of the psychology of language and of the language sciences. This Research Topic contributes to advancing our understanding of these problems by summarizing recent work from psycholinguists, developmental psychologists, students of dialog and conversation analysis, linguists, phoneticians, and comparative ethologists.

LC number: 2005048396

Long denigrated as dialects of Japanese, the Ryukyuan languages are today recognized as languages in their own right. However, speakers of Ryukyuan languages have suffered from stigmatization, oppressive language policies and domination from outside the Ryukyu Archipelago. As a result, the Ryukyuan languages are now severely endangered. This volume depicts, roughly in chronological order, aspects which have led to the language crisis in the Ryukyus today. Taking account of these factors is important because endangered languages can only be maintained and revitalized on the basis of a comprehensive understanding of why these languages became endangered in the first place. The chapters of this book have been written by leading experts in Ryukyuan sociolinguistics and the scope encompasses the entire field. It sheds light on the dark side of language modernization, on a misplaced obsession with monolingualism, and on Japan’s difficulties in surmounting its invented self-image.