Paper short abstract:

Using recordings of face-to-face and phone conversations as well as excerpts from social media, I show that personal pronouns are regularly employed in post-predicate position as means for affective stance display. As such, they resemble interactional particles, into which they may be developing.

Paper long abstract:

Although Japanese is traditionally regarded as a predicate-final language, in actual interactions, it allows various patterns of turn-constructional unit continuation (Couper-Kuhlen and Ono 2007), including utterance constructions that involve a prosodically integrated post-predicate element and, as such, are clearly planned as non-predicate-final from the start (Zawiszová 2018). One category of elements that commonly occur in the post-predicate position are personal pronouns expressing first- and second-person subjects. While some of them may be viewed as an afterthought or repair, many cannot be explained by referring to the speakers’ referential or discourse-pragmatic needs. Consequently, in light of the marked preference in Japanese for non-expression of first- and second-person subjects (Lee and Yonezawa 2008), their overt expression – coupled with their ‘non-canonical’ position – creates the implication of them being used to ‘do something more’ or ‘something other’ than simple referencing.

In this paper, I argue that what these referentially superfluous first- and second-person pronouns expressed in post-predicate position recurrently do is contribute to the construction of affective stance displays, that is, displays of emotions, feelings, moods, and attitudes, by intensifying the affective stance displays produced by co-occurring resources without specifying them. Speakers employ them when accomplishing various actions and activities, such as, praising, criticising, expressing surprise or irritation, complaining, troubles tellings, and so on. While the pronouns can be postpositionally marked by particles, zero-marking seems prevalent. In addition, zero-marked pronouns serving affective-stance-display-related function tend to be produced within the same intonation contour as the predicate they follow. As a result, they strongly resemble both in their function and in their position the category of interactional (or ‘sentence final’) particles. In fact, they seem to be undergoing the process of recategorization into interactional particles, which would be perfectly in line with what we know about the diachronic development of this category (Fujiwara 1982, 1985, 1986).

The paper draws on interactional linguistics and is based on analysis of my own collection of recordings of spontaneous face-to-face conversational interactions between Japanese young adult friends, telephone conversations included in the TalkBank CallFriend Japanese corpora, and extracts of written conversational interactions on social media.

Paper short abstract:

A self-repair is one of disfluency which inevitably occurs in real-time utterance production. In this presentation, I will introduce the idea of classifying self-repairs in Japanese monologue into five types. Almost 6,000 examples of self-repairs were extracted from Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese.

Paper long abstract:

In spontaneous speech, the production of utterance is largely affected by real-time constraints. A real-time constraint is one that is imposed on the speaker in that the speaker "must conduct the linear and real-time production of linguistic form that has well-formed syntactic structure" (cf. Levelt 1989). In such situations, the fluency of utterances can be lost, and various disfluencies emerge, such as long pauses, filled pauses, pronunciation errors, self-repairs, cut-offs, inversions, and insertions.

Such disfluencies inevitably occur in real utterance production. However, in actuality, even if a disfluency is included in a certain utterance, in most cases, this does not cause the listener to have difficulties in understanding. This fact suggests the existence of a meta-linguistic strategy that is shared among the participants.

In this presentation, I will introduce the idea of classifying self-repairs in Japanese monologue into five types; "Articulatory repairs (R1)," "Repetition (R2)," "Lexical/syntactic repairs (R3)," "Additional repairs (R4)," and "Paraphrase (R5)". R1 is assigned to mispronunciation and its immediate repair. R2 is assigned to simple repetition of words or phrases. R3 is assigned to the selection error of lexical items and its repair. R4 is assigned to insufficient information and its supplement. And R5 is assigned to an intended paraphrase of words or phrases. Almost 6,000 examples of self-repairs were manually extracted from the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese, and classified into five types. These are classifications based on morphological differences and the functions they perform within discourse.

As long as disfluencies inevitably emerge as a result of real-time constraints, both the speaker and the listener consider their emergence a precondition, and it can be thought that they manage speech by preparing a strategy to adequately process these disfluencies. If certain regularities and patterns can be recognized in such a strategy, this composes an important part for the description of "speech grammar." In other words, by categorizing disfluencies into several types and analyzing/describing their morphological/functional characteristics, this can contribute to the clarification of a mechanism that supports the management of speech communication.

Paper short abstract:

There are various plural personal expressions in Japanese, even though there are no grammatical marks of singular or plural form for nouns, each with their own unique nuance. Focusing on the word hitobito, we analyze the plurality of personal expressions and the speaker's subjectivity in them.

Paper long abstract:

　In many languages, plurality in personal expressions does not simply function as “more than one.” It can indicate speaker's subjective attitudes such as affection, respect, humility, and arrogance. Various plural personal expressions exist in Japanese, including watashitachi, wareware, watakushidomo, and others. Each has detailed usage restrictions and unique nuances. Hitobito is one of them, which expresses multiple people by repeating the word hito ʻpersonʼ. This word is considered the plural form of hito; however, the misuses can be confirmed in corpus by learners of Japanese as follows:

・When asked if the train was crowded: Mada anmari hitobito ga imasendeshita (There weren't many people yet).

・About a part-time job: Hitobito ni tabemono wo agerunogasukidesu（I like to give the food to people (customers)).

・Regarding New Year's events: Shinseki toka hitobito wa uchi ni kimasu（Relatives and people (friends and neighbors) come to my house).

　Why can we not get rid of the sense of incongruity even though they are all used as reference to ʻplural peopleʼ? How do Japanese speakers use this word? In this paper, through comparison with similar expressions such as hito, hitotachi, and ningen, we identify the characteristics of this word :　hitobito denotes an indefinite plural group of individuals, combined with the attribute of otherness, which excludes the speaker.

　The overuse and misuse by learners are caused by the highly versatile nature of plural expressions of persons in other languages as well as the fact that the reduplicated form hitobito is easy for learners to recognize, and the peculiar semantics of numbers in Japanese. The third factor is important from the contrastive linguistics viewpoint. In Japanese, with no grammatical marks for singular or plural, plural expressions have more value than plurality. In particular, personal expressions are related to the speaker's mental attitude toward the referent and perception of the situation.