Intonation Units in Japanese Conversation

Intonation Units in Japanese Conversation PDF Author: Kazuko Matsumoto
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027230751
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
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 production and information flow in spoken communication. It addresses various research topics: clause vs. phrase centrality, relationship between IUs and clauses, functions of independent NPs, preferred argument/clause structure and transitivity, interrelationship among functional components, and the role of new and interactional information in the shaping of IU syntax. Overall, it tries to elucidate not only the preferred IU structures that are typical of the way Japanese speakers talk in connected discourse, but also possible relationships between the structures and their implications. Besides three main chapters discussing the results of quantitative and qualitative analyses, it also includes an introductory chapter comprehensively covering key issues in research on information flow in spoken discourse in general. Thus the book will be useful to all students and researchers of functional linguistics and discourse analysis.

Intonation Units in Japanese Conversation

Intonation Units in Japanese Conversation PDF Author: Kazuko Matsumoto
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027230751
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Get Book

Book Description
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 production and information flow in spoken communication. It addresses various research topics: clause vs. phrase centrality, relationship between IUs and clauses, functions of independent NPs, preferred argument/clause structure and transitivity, interrelationship among functional components, and the role of new and interactional information in the shaping of IU syntax. Overall, it tries to elucidate not only the preferred IU structures that are typical of the way Japanese speakers talk in connected discourse, but also possible relationships between the structures and their implications. Besides three main chapters discussing the results of quantitative and qualitative analyses, it also includes an introductory chapter comprehensively covering key issues in research on information flow in spoken discourse in general. Thus the book will be useful to all students and researchers of functional linguistics and discourse analysis.

Turn-Taking in Japanese Conversation

Turn-Taking in Japanese Conversation PDF Author: Hiroko Tanaka
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027299080
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
This book explores the interpretation of grammar and turn-taking in Japanese talk-in-interaction from the perspective of conversation analysis. It pays special attention to the projectability patterns of turns in Japanese in comparison to English. Through qualitative and quantitative methods, it is shown that the postpositional grammatical structure and the predicate-final orientation in Japanese regularly result in a relatively delayed projectability of the possible point at which a current turn may become recognisably complete in comparison to English. Prior to such points, projectability is often limited to the progressive anticipation of small increments of talk. However, participants are able to achieve smooth speaker transitions with minimal gap or overlap through the use of specific grammatical and prosodic devices for marking possible points at which a transition may become relevant.

Turn-taking in English and Japanese

Turn-taking in English and Japanese PDF Author: Hiroko Furo
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135727651
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
This book examines turn-taking in English and Japanese conversations and political news interviews to investigate the relationship between language and interaction.

Units in Mandarin Conversation

Units in Mandarin Conversation PDF Author: Hongyin Tao
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027276102
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
This book provides a new way of studying grammar. The basic thrust of the book is to investigate grammar based on a prosodic unit, the intonation unit (IU), in spontaneous speech. The author challenges the dominant practice in the study of syntax, which has been to focus on the unit of the artificially constructed sentence. The book shows that some basic notions developed from sentence-level data often do not account well for speech data. For example, in many versions of syntactic theory, the basic syntactic structure of any sentence is assumed to comprise both an NP and a VP (with variations in terminology). However the author shows that a Mandarin sentence in spoken discourse can consist of a lone NP or a transitive verbal expression without any explicit argument (which is not due to anaphora). Although the book concerns Mandarin discourse and grammar, it will be of interest to students of a wide range of fields, including discourse analysis, syntax, conversation analysis, prosodic studies, and typological studies.

Intonation Units Revisited

Intonation Units Revisited PDF Author: Dagmar Barth-Weingarten
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027266905
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
Intonation units have been notoriously difficult to identify in natural talk. Problems include fuzzy boundaries, lack of exhaustivity, and the potential circularity involved when studying their interface with other language-organizational dimensions. This volume advocates a way to resolve such problems: the ‘cesura’ approach. Cesuras, or breaks in the flow of talk, are created by discontinuities in the prosodic-phonetic parameters of speech that cluster to various extents at certain points in time. Using conversation-analytic and interactional-linguistic methodology, the volume identifies the parameters creating cesuras in talk-in-interaction and proposes ways to notate them depending on the researcher’s goal. It also offers a way to study the role of cesuras at the prosody-syntax interface non-circularly, which leads to new insights concerning language variation and change. The volume will thus be of major import to anyone working with natural spoken language, its chunks, its various dimensions, and its variation and change.

In Search of Basic Units of Spoken Language

In Search of Basic Units of Spoken Language PDF Author: Shlomo Izre'el
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027261539
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 454

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Book Description
What is the best way to analyze spontaneous spoken language? In their search for the basic units of spoken language the authors of this volume opt for a corpus-driven approach. They share a strong conviction that prosodic structure is essential for the study of spoken discourse and each bring their own theoretical and practical experience to the table. In the first part of the book they segment spoken material from a range of different languages (Russian, Hebrew, Central Pomo (an indigenous language from California), French, Japanese, Italian, and Brazilian Portuguese). In the second part of the book each author analyzes the same two spoken English samples, but looking at them from different perspectives, using different methods of analysis as reflected in their respective analyses in Part I. This approach allows for common tendencies of segmentation to emerge, both prosodic and segmental.

Preferred Argument Structure

Preferred Argument Structure PDF Author: John W. Du Bois
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027226242
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
Preferred Argument Structure offers a profound insight into the relationship between language use and grammatical structure. In his original publication on Preferred Argument Structure, Du Bois (1987) demonstrated the power of this perspective by using it to explain the origins of ergativity and ergative marking systems. Since this work, the general applicability of Preferred Argument Structure has been demonstrated in studies of language after language. In this collection, the authors move beyond verifying Preferred Argument Structure as a property of a given language. They use the methodology to reveal more subtle aspects of the patterns, for example, to look across languages, diachronically or synchronically, to examine particular grammatical relations, and to examine special populations or particular genres. This volume will appeal to linguists interested in the relationship of pragmatics and grammar generally, in the typology of grammatical relations, and in explanations derived from data- and corpus-based approaches to analysis.

Information structure in spoken Japanese

Information structure in spoken Japanese PDF Author: Natsuko Nakagawa
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 3961101396
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
This study explores information structure (IS) within the framework of corpus linguistics and functional linguistics. As a case study, it investigates IS phenomena in spoken Japanese: particles including so-called topic particles, case particles, and zero particles; word order; and intonation. The study discusses how these phenomena are related to cognitive and communicative mechanisms of humans.

The Expressions of Culture in the Conversational Styles of Japanese and Americans

The Expressions of Culture in the Conversational Styles of Japanese and Americans PDF Author: Keiko Hirokawa
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Communication and culture
Languages : en
Pages : 960

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Book Description


Conversational Dominance and Gender

Conversational Dominance and Gender PDF Author: Hiroko Itakura
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9781588110572
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Annotation In this study, Itakura (The Hong Kong Polytechnic U.) analyzes gender dominance in conversations among Japanese speakers in both their native tongue (L1) and in English (L2). The interactions studied include institutional talk as well as everyday conversation. The author's approach draws upon Conversation Analysis, the Birmingham school of discourse analysis, and dialogical analysis to examine whether patterns of gender dominance in Japanese L2 conversation are similar to those found in L1 conversation. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).