Friday, October 15, 2010

Prof. Makoto Hayashi Speaks at UW

Department of East Asian Languages and Literature, Department of English and Department of Sociology
Present a lecture on Conversation Analysis

Proffering insertable elements: A study of other-initiated repair in Japanese

Makoto Hayashi
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Kaoru Hayano
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

4:30-6:00 pm
Friday, October 15, 2010
L185 Education


Abstract

Intended as a contribution to a growing effort to understand the organization of repair across languages, this paper examines one particular type of turn-constructional practice used for other-initiated repair in Japanese conversation. The target practice, which we term ‘proffering insertable elements’ (PIE), is described as follows. Upon completion of another speaker’s turn, the repair-initiating party proffers a candidate understanding of an element that was projected but not delivered in that prior turn. It is notable in this practice that the proffered candidate understanding is designed in such a way that it is grammatically ‘insertable’ into the structure of the trouble-source turn. For example:

A: kyuushuu ni kaeru koto ni shita toka yutte
Kyushu to return N PT did QT say
(X) told me (X) would go back to Kyushu. {(X) = unexpressed element}

-> B: oya ga?
parent SP
Your parents?

In this example, B proffers a candidate understanding of an element that was projected but not delivered in A’s turn, and she formats it as a subject noun phrase (a nominal + subject particle ga) that fits into the grammatical structure of A’s turn. Based on an examination of various other forms of other-initiated repair in Japanese, we argue that the format of PIE can be seen as asserting the least degree of speakership on the part of the repair-initiating party. This is so because, in this practice, the proffered understanding is designed and presented as if the repair-initiating party were voicing a part of the trouble source turn by another speaker. In other words, PIEs appear to be designed to maintain the trouble-source speaker’s speakership to a maximum degree while at the same time soliciting confirmation for a correct understanding of a projected yet undelivered element of that other speaker’s turn. We show that this design feature of PIEs makes them suitable for executing an other-initiated repair in a maximally aligning manner—‘aligning’ in the sense that it introduces a minimal disruption to the progressivity of the project that the other speaker is pursuing.

Saturday, October 2, 2010

CA Data Sessions—Fall 2010 Schedule

Fridays 4:15 - 6pm

Sewell building, room 8108

Oct 22 Jacque Preston

Collective Persuasions: Tropes, Schemes, and Ideographs

Participants in this Data session are three white female college students and their mothers. The group is discussing the young women's experiences transitioning to the University. Here, the six have moved into a conversation about "being gay." Specifically, I'm looking at how tropes, schemes, and ideographs (even more specifically devices such as reclassification, negation, and repair) are functioning to mediate sociocultural shifts within this social network. I'm not a linguist, so I could really use the perspectives of others.

Oct 29 Beth Godbee

Redistributing Power in One-with-one Writing Conferences

Nov 12 Jae A.D. Takeuchi" jtakeuchi@wisc.edu

I am looking at mutual understanding and negotiation of meaning in interactionsbetween speakers with multilingual backgrounds, and the interactions take place in Japanese.