East Asian Linguistics Workshop: "Trying to capture Japanese grammar in conversation," Tsuyoshi Ono

Abstract:

In our attempt to study language in context, we noticed a shared tendency in the field, including our own work, where traditional grammatical units, categories, and constructions (e.g., phrases, clauses, constituent order, and referential expressions) that were established based on constructed examples, i.e., NOT what speakers actually use, are given privileged statuses as basic forms of the grammar. It is subtle, but we often come across fine analyses of discourse data coupled with a static understanding of the structure where examples are analyzed using constructed examples as a starting point. That is, despite the warnings by Hopper (1987) and Linell (2005), we have not been able to escape from the commonly held but unsubstantiated idea that speakers bring fixed grammar to discourse context. We continue to see that constructed examples are assumed to constitute the basic forms of the grammar of spoken language. In this presentation, we examine traditional grammatical pieces in Japanese conversation data. We find examples in our data that 1) take rather different shapes from what has been portrayed as their basic forms in the literature, and 2) exhibit variations, which perhaps reflect ongoing changes. Such examples 1) challenge the common habit of assuming that constructed examples represent the underlying forms of the grammar of spoken language and 2) promote careful analyses of the linguistics structure actually used by speakers. This constitutes a critical component in our attempt to reach an understanding of human language.

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Tsuyoshi Ono is Professor at the University of Alberta, Canada, where he directs the Spoken Discourse Research Studio. His main area of research lies in the study of the nature of the structure and use of based on the examination of everyday language use in which he and his collaborators have published widely including series of volumes published by John Benjamins and journals Pragmatics, Discourse Processes, and Japanese Language and Literature, and several more are in press and in preparation. He is currently engaged in two large-scale collaborative projects: formulaic language in everyday spoken Japanese and a documentation of the Ikema dialect of Miyako, an endangered language spoken on remote Japanese islands near Taiwan.