Full Description
This volume brings together papers that take usage-based approaches to study the nature of human language, with a focus on the grammar of Japanese. The 12 chapters provide a rich array of data and methodologies, with topics ranging from phonology, modality, and grammatical morphemes, to sentential construction and discourse-level phenomena such as turn-taking, speech register, and language change. As a whole, they demonstrate that usage-based linguistics illuminates various phenomena in the language that could not have been well accounted for by resorting solely to a formal theory such as the Universal-Grammar-based approach. Reflecting theoretical, methodological, and technological advancements made in and outside the field of cognitive-functional linguistics in recent years, the papers contained in this volume, both individually and collectively, have significant implications towards linguistics in general and Japanese linguistics in particular, as we as Japanese language teaching.
Contents
1. Acknowledgement; 2. List of contributors; 3. Introduction: Situating usage-based (Japanese) linguistics (by Ono, Tsuyoshi); 4. Part 1. Cognition and language use; 5. Subordination and information status: A case of To and Koto complement clauses in Japanese (by McGloin, Naomi H.); 6. On state of mind and grammatical forms from functional perspectives: The case for Garu and Te-iru (by Johnson, Yuki); 7. Grammar of the internal expressive sentences in Japanese: Observations and explorations (by Iwasaki, Shoichi); 8. Subjectivity, intersubjectivity and Japanese grammar: A functional approach (by Shinzato, Rumiko); 9. What typology reveals about modality in Japanese: A cross-linguistic perspective* (by Horie, Kaoru); 10. Part 2. Frequency, interaction and language use; 11. If rendaku isn't a rule, what in the world is it? (by Vance, Timothy J.); 12. The semantic basis of grammatical development: Its implications for modularity, innateness, and the theory of grammar (by Shirai, Yasuhiro); 13. Interchangeability of so-called interchangeable particles: Corpus analysis of spatial markers, Ni and E (by Kabata, Kaori); 14. The re-examination of so-called 'clefts': A study of multiunit turns in Japanese talk-in-interaction (by Mori, Junko); 15. Activity, participation, and joint turn construction: A conversation analytic exploration of 'grammar-in-action' (by Hayashi, Makoto); 16. Part 3. Language change and variation; 17. Context in constructions: Variation in Japanese non-subject honorifics (by Matsumoto, Yoshiko); 18. The use and interpretation of "regional" and "standard" variants in Japanese conversation (by Okamoto, Shigeko); 19. Index
