East Asian Linguistics Workshop: "The role of contexts in fixedness and innovation: Findings from a study of the utterance-final tteyuu," Michiko Kaneyasu

Everyday language encompasses two seemingly contradictory qualities: fixedness and innovation. The formulaic nature allows effortless communication while the innovative capacity may fulfill the human need for creativity. In this talk, Professor Kaneyasu will discuss the role of contexts in the dynamic relationship between fixedness and innovation in language use. The discussion will draw on findings from a recent study of the Japanese utterance-final tteyuu [ʔtejɯː]. Tteyuu is a lexicalized combination of the quotative marker tte and the verb yuu (‘say’). It is used to introduce a name of a category noun (e.g., nan-nan tteyuu uta ‘a song called Nan-nan’) or to link a modifying clause to a modified content label noun (kay ga tokyo ni sunderu tteyuu uwasa ‘a rumor that Kay lives in Tokyo’). Although its utterance-final occurrences are commonly observed, we still know little what tteyuu does at this position. Professor Kaneyasu analyzed 120 cases of the utterance-final tteyuu in various spoken data and found that conversational participants use it to clarify something expressed in the prior talk. This is a type of repair practice. More importantly for the present discussion, the analysis revealed how the participants’ understanding of the ongoing speech activity and multimodal cues affect its use and interpretation. Furthermore, some specialized usages appear to motivate activity-bound pragmatic inferencing, leading to emergence of a new construction. These findings demonstrate that even those expressions that look fixed in one context are in flux; their functions and structures are always subject to negotiation and innovation through frequent use in new contexts.  

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Michiko Kaneyasu is Assistant Professor of World Languages and Cultures at Old Dominion University