Texas Linguistics Forum Vol. 48 (2004)

Cynthia Dickel Dunn
Japanese Honorific Use as Indexical of the Speaker's Situational Stance: Towards a New Model

Traditional analyses describe Japanese honorific use as determined by situational factors such as formality and the social status of the addressee or referent. The traditional model is inadequate to account for actual patterns of honorific use in which speakers rountinely shift honorific levels within a single situational context. This paper analyses the use of humble forms for self-reference in the context of speeches at Japanese wedding receptions. Rather than consistently using humble forms throughout their entire speech, wedding speakers shifted between humble and non-humble verb forms to index shifts in their stance towards the speech situation and the social role of wedding speaker. Humble forms were used for speech acts in which the speaker announced his/her actions in the conventionalized role of wedding speaker. By contrast, speakers shifted to non-humble forms to distance themselves from and comment upon their performance in the wedding speaker role. The data demonstrate that the use of humble forms cannot be accounted for solely by external situational factors, but rather indexes the speaker's stance towards the situation and the social persona s/he wishes to project.

Susan Ervin-Tripp,Martin Lampert, Elena Escalera,and Iliana Reyes
"It was hecka funny": Some Features of Children's Conversational Development

In adults laughter can mark political solidarity and relieve grief. In adult comedy or adult humorous turns in conversation one can see placement of humor in the conversation, addressing shared perspectives and issues, picking a target every ally can share, using code switches effectively, deploying style features either to mimic someone or to allude to social features or values, and taking risks to self-presentation or to social relationships when the key of the conversation clearly implies irrealis. By examining the development of peer humor in children from three to ten we can find the emergence of these features in monolingual and bilingual boys and girls when adults are not participants. Child bilinguals use code switching as a kind of pragmatic marker just as monolinguals use prosodic and lexical discourse markers. In humor, switches have added values for conveying social features, providing a special window onto pragmatic development.

Kevin Heffernan
Retention of Obsolescent Features in Replacing Languages: Okinawans' Struggle to Retain their Voice

This study demonstrates that the prosody of an obsolescent language, Okinawan, has affected the prosody of the replacing language, Standard Japanese (SJ), resulting in the creation of a new dialect of Japanese. A study of the pitch-accent system of 90 speakers from the Yaeyama area of Okinawa, Japan showed that the number of speakers demonstrating the acquisition of the SJ pitch-accent system increases among the younger speaker cohorts. However, for all age groups the most common prosodic system was a simplified system that eliminated phonological contrast by using a falling pitch (common to both SJ and Okinawan) for every noun class. Surprisingly, although the number of speakers using the simplified system initially showed a decreasing trend, there is a sudden increase in popularity among the youngest speakers, with the simplified system winning out over the SJ system. This increase coincides with changing attitudes towards the Okinawan popular culture among both the Okinawans and the mainland Japanese, suggesting that the new dialect is here to stay. These results open new ground on obsolescent languages, as previous research has overlooked cases where the obsolescent language has a persistent and apparently permanent influence on the replacement language.

Jeong-Yeon Kim
Direct Correction and Power in Lab Hour Interactions: Nonnative Teaching Assistants and Native Students

A lab hour, a major instructional setting of engineering and science departments of many U.S. universities, provides a special conversational event in which nonnative teaching assistants (NNS TAs) teach native English-speaking (NS) students. The NNS TAs are frequently engaged in one-on-one interactions with NS students while answering questions and/or helping to complete projects or assignments. While possessed of better knowledge of content areas, a NNS TA's L2 competence hardly reaches the native level. This qualitative study examines cases in which NS students opt to directly correct their TA's production and input. Specially focused are the questions of how NNS TAs coordinate verbal and non-verbal interactional resources contingent upon this often-dispreferred interactional behavior in the course of meaning negotiation, and more importantly, what consequences the participant's actions bring to participant alignment and power relationship. From the video-taped data of spontaneous one-on-one interactions in which 5 Korean and 4 NS TAs participate, this microethnographic study examines sequential organization of repair (Schegloff, Jefferson, & Sacks, 1977).

Mai Kuha
Investigating the Spread of "So" as an Intensifier: Social and Structural Factors

So has a well-established use as an intensifying adverb modifying adjectives (That is so cool!). For some speakers, it is gaining the ability to modify verbs (I am so going to flunk this test, I so need a nap). Research is needed to determine in what order the new structural environments emerge, who the speakers adopting the change are, and how social factors influence the process. This paper reports on exploratory research in order to generate hypotheses for more systematic research.
Observed use of so shows that it can occur wherever traditional verb-modifying intensifying adverbs occur. Naturalness judgment data suggest the following patterns to investigate. One way in which so begins to spread may be that it remains in position after a BE verb, but comes to be viewed as a verb-modifying intensifier, so that elements other than adjectives follow (You're so lying right now). However, BE followed by so and a noun phrase seems to be a later development, as does negation. Modals might provide an alternate starting place for the spread of so, but auxiliary HAVE followed by so emerges later. Finally, findings suggest that speakers do not adopt so structure by structure, but by means of specific expressions.

Kris Markman
To Send or Not to Send: Turn Construction in Computer-Mediated Chat

As new communication technologies have become increasingly integrated into our everyday lives, researchers have begun to explore the various ways we use these technologies for social interaction. Recently researchers have begun to look beyond the content of online interactions, into the structure of electronic communication, in order to describe how people make sense of conversation in this new medium. One emerging approach to this problem is to employ methods derived from Conversation Analysis. This paper will add to this small but growing line of research by investigating the turn construction process in a computer-mediated chat environment. I analyze and describe the turn construction activities of one member of a team of undergraduate students enrolled in a group communication course. I examine the process she underwent as she followed the conversation and responded to the other members of the team, and decided how to construct each turn and when to hit send, the electronic equivalent of claiming the floor. Using data from a computer screen capture, video recordings of the meeting room, and the proceedings of the chat itself, I will describe how this team member engages in self-repair and turn monitoring by analyzing her editing changes, pauses, and external distractions.

Yael Maschler
Accepting while Shifting: The Discourse Marker tov ('okay, fine', lit. 'good') in Israeli Hebrew Talk-in-Interaction

The Hebrew word tov is listed in Even-Shoshan's dictionary (1986) as an adjective meaning good, as an adverb, a noun, a verb, and as a word of agreement and affirmation meaning eyes, fine. The present study focuses on this last meaning of tov in Israeli Hebrew casual conversation, as well as on another meaning, not listed in any of the dictionaries. In both of these uses, tov comprises a discourse marker (Maschler 2002). In the corpus examined, 46.7% of tov tokens are employed by the addressee and function in the interpersonal realm as (1) agreement, (2) acceptance, (3) third turn receipt, (4) concession, or (5) ironic agreement, i.e. disagreement; while 38.3% of tov tokens are employed by the speaker and function in the textual realm to mark transitions (1) at beginnings of major narrational or elicitational topics (Chafe 1994), (2) between episodes or sub-episodes of a narrative, (3) returning to an interrupted action, or (4) at the end of a topic/action. Another 15% of the tokens perform both interpersonal and textual functions simultaneously. Those tokens functioning simultaneously in both realms are particularly illuminating for my research on discourse markers, as close examination of the contexts in which they occur suggests how a particular marker might come to serve both interpersonal as well as textual functions. This study, then, explores the functions of tov in Israeli Hebrew casual conversation in order to reveal the functional itinerary followed by this discourse marker, thus contributing to cross-language studies of grammaticization of discourse markers (e.g., Fleischman & Yaguello 1999, Traugott & Dasher 2002).

Siri Mehus
The Micro-Organization of Taking a Break: Transitions Between Task and Non-Task Activities at Work

This paper examines the collaborative accomplishment of transitions between work and breaks in a small architectural firm, showing that such seemingly unstructured events are in fact subtly organized and socially coordinated. Examination of these moments suggests that taking a break is a social activity, but one that is rarely coordinated explicitly. Rather, employees make their actions visible (and audible) to one another and monitor each other for uptake. In doing so, they make limited use of verbal cues, relying primarily on their bodies and material objects to signal their intentions. I contend that these moments are relevant for the study of professional identity and organizational structure. Through the way that they manage these transitions, architects display their attitudes towards the activities on either side?work and breaks. The ability to do so appropriately is arguably an important element of professional competence. In addition, these moments can constitute sites at which the hierarchy of the organization is enacted: frame-by-frame analysis of one instance shows how the shift to a new activity hinges on actions of the principal architect. This suggests that these junctures can reveal much about the social organization of a workplace and the micro-practices through which it is produced

Shaylih Muehlmann
Discourse of Diversity

Recent work in Anthropology has examined the current fascination with biodiversity in both academic and popular discourses (Escobar, Brosius 1999, Bamford 2002). These critiques have argued that while the term ostensibly describes an objective reality it simultaneously constructs the threat to the environment in a particular way, prescribing the role that certain actors should play. In the following I will argue that when the concept of biodiversity, and the notion of ecology it extends to, are brought to bear on the language advocacy movement the threat to linguistic diversity is similarly constructed in a particular way. Using Williams' (1976) notion of a keyword as a site at which the meaning of social experience is negotiated and contested, this essay combines both textual and visual analysis of the literature on the endangerment of linguistic diversity. Specifically, this essay explores the ambiguities and contradictions that arise as these environmental discourses are deployed, appropriated and transformed in the literature on language endangerment.

The idea that gender is constructed through performance (Butler 1990; West & Zimmerman 1987) has been further developed by work showing that the construction of gender is to a large extent culture-dependent as far as performance of gendered identities is concerned (Ong 2001, Feminism and Race). Using linguistic data from khotis, a sexual minority of India, I provide evidence in support of the claim that the verbal construction of gender and sexuality must be understood as specific to Indian culture. I focus on how naming practices, choices of linguistic features and interactional style are involved in the construction of membership in the gendered group referred to as khotis. Using data from my 2003 fieldwork in Lucknow and New Delhi, I show that Farasi plays an important role in the construction of khotis' sexual identity as distinct from males, females, gays, and lesbians.
I also focus on the khotis' practice of referring to themselves and one another using the feminine markers. I argue that feminine self-reference are used to perform the discourses of powerlessness and submission. My argument is that gender is not only a social construct but it is also a culture dependent social construct.

Chaim Noy
From Persuasion to Self-Transformation: Interpersonal Genres of Narration in a Tourist Speech Community

In this talk I explore how tourists travel-narratives performatively implicate their audience in their taleworlds vis-a-vis persuading them to travel and establishing an experience of self-transformation. The implication is discursively achieved vis-a-vis the creation of a dialogical-intersubjective realm wherein the narrators' identity claims are persuasively performed, and into which the audience is drawn. Through listening to their stories, it is argued, the audience partakes in a practice which is part and parcel of the constitutive rituals that are at the core of the speech community. Storytelling, and storyhearing, are not a byproduct of the adventurous travel, then, but rather share the same ritualistic realm of eventful practices, in which the trip is also a narrative event. Through this fusion of narrated events with the event of narration, between referential and performative communicative capacities, conversational storytelling creates a profoundly eventful impression. In it the interviewer-audience is positioned as a novice who seeks knowledge, and the conversation is constructed as the commencement of her or his own process of self-transformation. Enacted dialogically, persuasion and self-transformation genres show how personal narratives are interpersonally co-produced, and how an intersubjective realm of experience is linguistically created within the narration performance.