This book presents research findings on the overall process of storytelling as a social event in Japanese everyday conversations focusing on the relationship between a story and surrounding talks, the social and cultural aspects of the participants, and the tellability of conversational stories. Focusing on the participants’ verbal and nonverbal behavior and their use of linguistic devices, the chapters describe how the participants display their orientation to the a) embeddedness of the story in the conversation, b) their views of past events, c) their knowledge about the story content and elements, and d) their social circumstances, and how these four elements are relevant for a story becoming worth telling and sharing. The book furthers the sociolinguistic analysis of conversational storytelling by describing how the participants’ concerns about social circumstances as members of a particular community, specifically their role relationships and interpersonal relationships with others, influence the shape of their storytelling.

This book investigates the intricate interplay between language and food in natural conversations among people eating and talking about food in English, Japanese, Wolof, Eegimaa, Danish, German, Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. It is a socio-cultural/ linguistic study of how adults/ children organize their language and bodies to (1) accomplish rituals and performances of commensality (eating together) and food-related actions, (2) taste, describe, identify and assess food, and influence others’ preferences, (3) create and reinforce individual and group identities through past experiences and stories about food, and (4) socialize one another to food practices, affect, taste, gender and health norms. Using approaches from linguistics, conversation analysis, ethnography, discursive psychology, and linguistic anthropology, this book elucidates the dynamic verbal and nonverbal co-construction of food practices, assessments, categories, and identities in conversations over and about food, and contributes to research on contextualized social, cultural, and cognitive activity, language and food, and cross-cultural understanding.

An up-to-date overview by actual practitioners of key research methodologies currently used in language and gender study.

This book explores the interpretation of grammar and turn-taking in Japanese talk-in-interaction from the perspective of conversation analysis. It pays special attention to the projectability patterns of turns in Japanese in comparison to English. Through qualitative and quantitative methods, it is shown that the postpositional grammatical structure and the predicate-final orientation in Japanese regularly result in a relatively delayed projectability of the possible point at which a current turn may become recognisably complete in comparison to English. Prior to such points, projectability is often limited to the progressive anticipation of small increments of talk. However, participants are able to achieve smooth speaker transitions with minimal gap or overlap through the use of specific grammatical and prosodic devices for marking possible points at which a transition may become relevant.