This study analyzes how morphosyntactic structures and information flow characteristics are used by interlocutors in producing and understanding clauses in conversational Javanese, focusing on the Cirebon variety of the language. While some clauses display grammatical mechanisms used to code their structure explicitly and redundantly, many other clauses include few if any of these grammatical resources. These extremes mark a cline between the morphosyntactic and paratactic expression of clauses. The situation is thrown into relief by the frequency of unexpressed referents and conversationalists' heavy reliance on shared experience and cultural knowledge. In all cases, pragmatic inference grounded in the interactional context is essential for establishing not only the discourse functions, but indeed also the very structure of clauses in conversational Javanese. This study contributes to our understanding of transitivity, emergent constituency, prosodic organization and the co-construction of meaning and structure by conversational interlocutors.

How do hearers manage to understand speakers? And how do speakers manage to shape hearers' understanding? Lepore and Stone show that standard views about the workings of semantics and pragmatics are unsatisfactory. They advance an alternative view which better captures what is going on in linguistic communication.

Concepts such as dependability/generalization and inferences are dealt with implicitly or explicitly in any research undertaken in applied linguistics. This volume provides a well-balanced and cross-disciplinary perspective on how researchers conceptualize inferences about learner acquisition and performances as well as dependability and generalizability of findings. The book is a collection of chapters by prominent researchers in applied linguistics, working in diverse domains such as vocabulary, syntax, discourse analysis, SLA, and language testing. The goal of the book is to bring attention to these issues, which underpin much of applied linguistics research and to highlight what is considered good practice so as to buttress confidence in the research claims made. The book represents current thinking on fundamental research concepts in applied linguistics and can be used as a textbook in courses on research methodology in applied linguistics. The book is also an excellent source of in-depth analysis of research conceptualization for applied linguistics researchers and graduate students.

This monograph provides a micro-analytic description of instances of requests in everyday German conversation. Using the framework of CA, the study systematically analyzes the grammatical and syntactical structure of the request-turn and its response and of the conversational exchanges before and within the request base sequence, and the placement of the request sequence within the larger social interaction. Through an empirical analysis of individual cases of request sequences in German, the monograph describes in detail: (a) how speakers employ grammar and syntax as resources to construct turns at talk and accomplish the social action of request; (b) how speakers use grammatical and syntactical forms of the language to coordinate the production of the social action of requests; (c) how speakers use grammar and syntax as interactional resources to manage affiliative and remedial work (i.e., face work) when performing delicate social actions such as requests; and (d) how the context of the request activity impacts the grammatical and syntactical constructions of speakers' utterances. Additionally, the monograph demonstrates that both the grammatical construction of turns and their placement within the talk are oriented to the sequential context of the interaction.

This monograph contains the first systematic investigation of the Japanese ‘dative subject’ construction across time and space. It demonstrates that, in order to capture what speakers/writers know about how to put an utterance or a clause together, it is necessary to pay attention to what they do in actual language use and in different discourse types. The work also shows the importance of diachronic perspectives to help us better understand the ways in which a particular grammatical structure is represented synchronically. By utilizing modern Japanese conversation, contemporary Japanese novels, and a pre-modern and modern Japanese literature corpus, the study highlights the role of ‘dative subjects’ at the semantic and discourse-pragmatic levels. Specifically, it demonstrates that what has been considered to be a most ‘grammatical’ aspect of Japanese actually turns out to be rather pragmatically oriented.

Prosody is constitutive for spoken interaction. In more than 25 years, its study has grown into a full-fledged and very productive field with a sound catalogue of research methods and principles. This volume presents the state of the art, illustrates current research trends and uncovers potential directions for future research. It will therefore be of major interest to everyone studying spoken interaction. The collection brings together an impressive range of internationally renowned scholars from different, yet closely related and compatible research traditions which have made a significant contribution to the field. They cover issues such as the units of language, the contextualization of actions and activities, conversational modalities and genres, the display of affect and emotion, the multimodality of interaction, language acquisition and aphasia. All contributions are based on empirical, audio- and/or video-recorded data of natural talk-in-interaction, including languages such as English, German and Japanese. The methodologies employed come from Ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics.

How can computers distinguish the coherent from the unintelligible, recognize new information in a sentence, or draw inferences from a natural language passage? Computational semantics is an exciting new field that seeks answers to these questions, and this volume is the first textbook wholly devoted to this growing subdiscipline. The book explains the underlying theoretical issues and fundamental techniques for computing semantic representations for fragments of natural language. This volume will be an essential text for computer scientists, linguists, and anyone interested in the development of computational semantics.

Cecilia E. Ford explores the question: what work do adverbial clauses do in conversational interaction? Her analysis of this predominating conjunction strategy in English conversation is based on the assumption that grammars reflect recurrent patterns of situated language use, and that a primary site for language is in spontaneous talk. She considers the interactional as well as the informational work of talk and shows how conversationalists use grammar to coordinate their joint language production. The management of the complexities of the sequential development of a conversation, and the social roles of conversational participants, have been extensively examined within the sociological approach of Conversation Analysis. Dr Ford uses Conversation Analysis as a framework for the interpretation of interclausal relations in her database of American English conversations. Her book contributes to a growing body of research on grammar in discourse, which has until recently remained largely focused on monologic rather than dialogic functions of language.

Human language allows us to plan, communicate, and create new ideas, without limit. Yet we have only finite experiences, and our languages have finite stores of words. Drawing on research from neuroscience, psychology, and linguistics, David Adger takes us on a journey to the hidden structure behind all we say (or sign) and understand.