[We will hold a panel at the 2003 Internatinal Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis Conference in Manchester in July 2003.]
Recently, some functional linguists have been attempting to employ Conversation Analysis to reconceptualize the concept of grammar, in the analysis of naturally occurring interaction. Insofar as grammar is a set of practices by which to construct sentences in actual interaction, it is quite reasonable to start with looking at the actual use of words in interaction to study grammar. Certainly, it has been demonstrated on the basis of Conversation Analysis that sentence construction is a radically interactional phenomenon and an organizational feature of interaction, rather than a computational feature of the brain or mind. On the other hand, however, a question comes up: Is it possible for those functional linguists who cherish the concept of frequency to get hold of the normative character of grammar?
The panel will feature four presentations, each analyzing Japanese data from various settings. Hiroko Tanaka will explore the relation between Japanese grammar and the organization of dispreferred actions. She will also show how an interactional task may be accomplished when speakers exploit grammatical features of the Japanese language in constructing a turn at talk in which a dispreferred action is performed. Tomoyo Takagi and Aug Nishizaka will each focus on a particular particle and attempt to relocate the use of the particle in the construction of a turn at talk and a distinct action sequence, rather than in functions of mind or the brain. Takagi will present data that centers on interaction involving children. In particular, she will focus on the children's use of the so-called attention-getting term 'anone', describing how it is intricately employed by children to manage turn-taking. Nishizaka will analyze data from radio counseling programs, in which call-in clients introduce their rejection of or challenge to advice given by a counselor with a continuity token, i.e., 'sorede [and]', rather than a contrastive token. Scott Saft will consider institutional talk, more specifically, an episode of interaction occurring in a mental. Focusing on how the mental patient used not only grammar but also the identities of her interlocutors as resources to maintain control of the topic of the talk, he will suggest that research on grammar and interaction needs to give more consideration to the identities of the participants. Domenic Berducci will analyze interaction in which a biochemist trains a technician in spectrographic analysis. Focusing on the changes in both the form of the biochemist's directives and the technician's responses during the training, he will present an alternative conception of learning to its conventional cognitivist conception.
Thus, in this panel, we attempt to reconseptualize grammar from the Conversation Analytic point of view. Also we attempt to elucidate how this reconstruction can be related to the Wittgensteinian conception of rule-following.
This is a preliminary investigation into the relation between Japanese grammar and the performance of dispreferred actions, such as disagreements, rejections of requests, and coparticipant criticism. As is well-known in the CA literature, dispreferred turns are structurally more complex than preferred turns, and are regularly delayed, prefaced by elements projecting their dispreferred status, delivered with dysfluencies such as cut-offs, sound-stretches, laugh tokens or breathiness, accompanied by accounts, mitigated or made indirect. Due to the organization of Japanese conversational grammar, it will be argued that participants have considerable room for maneuver in maximizing or minimizing compliance with dispreferred formats, in accordance with local interactional exigencies. For instance, on one extreme, the standard word order allows dispreferred actions to be vastly delayed until the proximity of the terminal position within a turn. On the other hand, speakers can exploit the features of word-order variability and 'ellipsis' to bring forward the overt performance of a dispreferred activity to the beginning of a turn. Such possibilities are utilized by participants in both ordinary conversation and institutional contexts for accomplishing nuanced interactional activities as well as for displays of relationality.
My presentation focuses on Japanese children's use of 'an(o)ne(:)' produced prior to some stretch of talk. 'Anone' has been generally described as an attention-getting device. However, such a description does not fully capture the child's intricate management of turn-taking in spite of their limited access to linguistic resources. The analysis shows that use of 'an(o)ne(:)' in children's talk in my data has properties of 1)a pre-telling which obligates the co-participant who acknowledges it to listen further and the producer to talk further, and 2) repeatability, which serves to solicit the recipient's deferred acknowledgement, which eventually generates the situation described in 1).
Furthermore, I will examine some deviant cases of turns prefaced with 'an(o)ne(:)' that are produced in second position in response to a questioning turn--not congruous with its pre-telling character. The deployment of the 'an(o)ne(:)' preface in such a position seems to allow the child to take the turn for which an answering action is relevant, hence securing the recipient's continued engagement in the ongoing interaction, while producing talk not closely tied to the preceding question.
Finally, the implications of the analysis will be discussed, in particular, in connection with functional linguistic approaches to form-function relationship and studies of language development.
When participants reject or challenge advice given by co-participants in Japanese talk-in-interaction, they often introduce their rejection or challenge with a contractive token, such as "demo [but]", "'tteyuuka [or]", "iya [no]" and the like. However, in the context of radio counseling programs, participants, call-in clients in particular, introduce their rejection of or challenge to advice given by a counselor with a continuity token, i.e., "sorede [and]" or its variants. What gets done with the placement of a specific word in a specific sequential context? In the analysis of fragments, mainly, from Japanese radio counseling programs, I show how this placement of the word is related to the sequence organization of advice-seeking and advice-giving. The organizational problem of the placement of a word is the organizational problem of a specific action sequence, rather than the syntactic or semantic problem of linguistic forms. In these terms, I attempt to reconceptualize grammar as practices of arranging words in interaction, discussing what is wrong with the conventional (both Chomskian and functional linguistic) conceptions of grammar. Finally, note that what I deal with in this paper is not the peculiarity of the Japanese language, but rather the general problem of the interactional organization of a distinct action sequence.
Working in collaboration with functional linguists, conversation analysts have become increasingly interested in the relationship between grammar and social interaction. Focusing on both casual conversation and talk in institutional settings, analysts have been recasting grammar as a set of resources deployed to construct turns and accomplish social actions.
Through an analysis of an interactional episode involving a mental patient, her doctor, and her daughter, this study builds on prior research by showing how the mental patient uses grammatical resources, particularly interrogatives, to prompt the doctor to answer questions about her physical maladies and thereby keep the focus of the interaction away from her mental problems. However, the analysis also finds that the mental patient routinely employs non-interrogative utterances that have the same effect as questions, namely, they prompt the doctor to speak to her physical problems. In constructing these non-interrogative utterances, the analysis suggests that, in addition to grammar, the mental patient also makes use of the identity of her interlocutor as a resource for maintaining control over the topic of the talk. Understanding of the organization of the interaction, in other words, requires examination of the relationship not only between grammar and interaction but also among grammar, interaction and identity.
The concept of learning has been and continues to be dominated by Cartesian psychological theorists and cognitive scientists. Their focus is largely on internal changes an individual undergoes while learning. Further, they regard these internal changes as empirical entities and expect that as their technology improves, they will ultimately discover the essence of learning.
This study, through an analysis of interaction of a Japanese biochemist training a technician in spectrographic analysis is an attempt to negate the above conception of learning as one empirical object to be discovered, by exploring the conceptual and empirical connections between directives in scientific interaction and Wittgensteinian orders. This study shows how the biochemist's actions that verbally and non-verbally control the technician to perform the spectrographic analysis for the first time, guide their practice. This study will also show how the changes in both the form of these orders, and the technicians responses during the training, constitute a public demonstration of learning, indicating that in psychological and cognitive scientific theories, where learning essentially consists of internal change, are confused.