Tsuyoshi Ono

Ritva Laury

This volume concerns the structure and use of fixed expressions in a range of typologically, genetically and areally distinct languages. The chapters consider the use contexts of fixed expressions, at the same time taking seriously the need to account for their structural aspects. Formulaicity is taken here as a central feature of everyday language use, and fixed expressions as a basic utterance building resource for interaction. Our crosslinguistic investigation suggests that humans have the propensity to automatize ways to handle various discourse-level needs for specific sequential contexts by creating (semi-)fixed expressions based on frequent patterns. The chapters examine topics such as the degrees and types of fixedness, the emergence of fixed expressions, their connection to social action, the new understanding of traditional linguistic categories in light of fixedness, crosslinguistic variation in types of fixed expressions, as well as their non-verbal aspects. The volume situates the notion of ‘units’ of language at the intersection of interaction and formal structure as part of a larger effort to replace rule-based conceptions of language with a more dynamic, realistic and pragmatically based model of language. The articles are based on naturally occurring data, mostly everyday conversation, in English, Estonian, Finnish, Japanese, and Mandarin, with some crosslinguistic comparison.

Building language structure and social action

Fixed Expressions

Kimberly Jones

This innovative and interdisciplinary book on style shifting in Japanese brings together a wide range of perspectives and methodologiesincluding discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics, and functional linguisticsto look at a variety of types of style shifting in both spoken and written Japanese discourse. Though diverse in approach, the contributions all reflect the belief that language use is inextricably linked to both context and language structure in mutually constitutive relationships. Topics covered include shifting between "polite" and "plain" styles, the emergence of a "semi-polite" style, speakers' strategic use of gendered styles or regional dialects, shifting between different deictic expressions, and prosodic shifting. This careful and detailed examination advances our understanding of the complex phenomenon of style shifting not only in Japanese, but also more generally, and will be of interest to researchers and students in fields such as linguistics, linguistic anthropology, communication studies, and second language acquisition and teaching.

Style Shifting in Japanese

This volume concerns the structure and use of fixed expressions in a range of typologically, genetically and areally distinct languages. The chapters consider the use contexts of fixed expressions, at the same time taking seriously the need to account for their structural aspects. Formulaicity is taken here as a central feature of everyday language use, and fixed expressions as a basic utterance building resource for interaction. Our crosslinguistic investigation suggests that humans have the propensity to automatize ways to handle various discourse-level needs for specific sequential contexts by creating (semi-)fixed expressions based on frequent patterns. The chapters examine topics such as the degrees and types of fixedness, the emergence of fixed expressions, their connection to social action, the new understanding of traditional linguistic categories in light of fixedness, crosslinguistic variation in types of fixed expressions, as well as their non-verbal aspects. The volume situates the notion of 'units' of language at the intersection of interaction and formal structure as part of a larger effort to replace rule-based conceptions of language with a more dynamic, realistic and pragmatically based model of language. The articles are based on naturally occurring data, mostly everyday conversation, in English, Estonian, Finnish, Japanese, and Mandarin, with some crosslinguistic comparison.

Building Language Structure and Social Action

Ryoko Suzuki

The chapters in this volume focus on how we might understand the concept of ‘unit’ in human languages. It is an analytical notion that has been widely adopted by linguists of various theoretical and applied orientations but has recently been critically examined by both typologically oriented and interactional linguistics. This volume contributes to and extends this discussion by examining the nature of units in actual usage in a range of genetically and typologically unrelated languages, English, Finnish, Indonesian, Japanese, and Mandarin, engaging with fundamental theoretical issues. The chapters show that categories originally created for the description of Indo-European languages have limited usefulness if our goal is to understand the nature of human language in general. The authors thus question the status of traditionally accepted linguistic units, especially their static understanding as a priori entities, and suggest instead that an emergent and interactional view of both structure and function offers a better fit with the data from the languages examined. Originally published as special issue 43:2 (2019) of Studies in Language.

Tsuyoshi Ono

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