This book addresses the long discussed issue of Japanese interactive markers (traditionally called sentence-final particles) in a new light, and provides the comprehensive linguistic documentation of the interactional functions of seven interactive markers: ne, na, yo, sa, wa, zo and ze. By adopting three key notions, ‘involvement’, ‘formality’ and ‘gender’, the study not only reveals the functions and pragmatic effects of each marker, but also sheds light on some fundamental issues of the nature of spoken discourse in general, including how speakers collaborate with each other to create and sustain their conversations and how linguistic functions of verbal forms interface with sociocultural norms. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in a wide range of linguistic fields such as Japanese linguistics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and applied linguistics and to teachers and learners of Japanese and of a second/foreign language.

From the twins Osugi and Peeco to longstanding icon Miwa Akihiro, Claire Maree traces the figure of the Japanese queerqueen, showing how a diversity of gender identifications, sexual orientations, and discursive styles are commodified and packaged together to form this character. Representations of gay men's speech have changed in tandem with gender norms, increasingly crossing over into popular media via the body of the "authentic" gay male up to and including the current "LGBT boom" in Japan. In this context, queerqueen demonstrates how commercial practices of recording, transcribing, and editing spoken interactions and use of on-screen text encode queerqueen speech as inherently excessive and in need of containment. Tackling questions of authenticity, self-censorship, and the restrictions of heteronormativity within this perception of queer excess, Maree shows how queerqueen styles reproduce stereotypes of gender, sexuality, and desire that are essential to the business of mainstream entertainment.

This edited book brings together studies on different aspects of marginalization in Japanese, creating a framework for studying marginalization which can also be applied in other linguistic and international contexts. The chapters in this book look at both marginalization of others and self-marginalization, examining the pragmatic strategies used to achieve marginalization, and investigating situations where it acts as an agentive tactic of speakers, in addition to a strategy of broader social structures. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of sociolinguistics, pragmatics, linguistic anthropology, and East Asian languages and cultures.

The 7th International Conference of the Gruppo di Studi sulla Comunicazione Parlata, dedicated to the memory of Claire Blanche-Benveniste, chose as its main theme Speech and Corpora. The wide international origin of the 235 authors from 21 countries and 95 institutions led to papers on many different languages. The 89 papers of this volume reflect the themes of the conference: spoken corpora compilation and annotation, with the technological connected fields; the relation between prosody and pragmatics; speech pathologies; and different papers on phonetics, speech and linguistic analysis, pragmatics and sociolinguistics. Many papers are also dedicated to speech and second language studies. The online publication with FUP allows direct access to sound and video linked to papers (when downloaded).

This book is one of the pioneering historical pragmatic studies of Japanese. It closely illustrates the usage and contributions of some Japanese discourse markers, and reveals their developmental history. The section on Synchronic Analysis explores the previously uninvestigated functions of some discourse markers used in Present Day Japanese. Moment by moment in on-going conversations, where culturally rigidly-defined interactional norms are highly valued, a specific marker is chosen and used by the speakers as their strategy, based on their quite subjective judgment. The section on Diachronic Analysis then demonstrates chronologically how the meanings and forms of the same markers have come into being. Results include some noticeable changes related to the strengthened intersubjectivity. This multi-dimensional study also discusses the relevance of findings to typological characteristics and productivity. Consideration is further given to why certain expressions (rather than others) become discourse markers and independent forms in Japanese.

Studies of Discourse Markers so far have concentrated on either the descriptive or the theoretical parameter. This book brings together thirteen papers concerning aspects of lexical instantiations of Discourse Marking devices, ranging from functional descriptions along cognitive, attitudinal, interactive and structure signalling lines to theoretical issues arising from various properties discourse markers display cross-linguistically. Data from English, Finnish, Hebrew, Korean, and Japanese are examined. Also addressed are questions concerning overall accounts, potential sub-classifications, possible form-function correlations and the appropriateness of such frameworks as Relevance Theory for their description. Interestingly, features evident in the distribution and use of lexical discourse markers are shown to affect the assessment of such theoretical constructs as the distinction between conceptual and procedural meaning. A more sophisticated picture emerges than a simple dichotomy between the two. Studies of the grammar of Discourse Markers hence would have to take the observations and suggestions raised in this collection of papers into account.

Using theoretical concepts of self, perspective, and voice as an interpretive guide, and based on the Place of Negotiation theory, this volume explores the phenomenon of linguistic creativity in Japanese discourse, i.e., the use of language in specific ways for foregrounding personalized expressive meanings. Personalized expressive meanings include psychological, emotive, interpersonal, and rhetorical aspects of communication, encompassing broad meanings such as feelings of intimacy or distance, emotion, empathy, humor, playfulness, persona, sense of self, identity, rhetorical effects, and so on. Nine analysis chapters explore the meanings, functions, and effects observable in the indices of linguistic creativity, focusing on discourse creativity (style mixture, borrowing others' styles, genre mixture), rhetorical creativity (puns, metaphors, metaphors in multimodal discourse), and grammatical creativity (negatives, demonstratives, first-person references). Based on the analysis of verbal and visual data drawn from multiple genres of contemporary cultural discourse, this work reveals that by creatively expressing in language we share our worlds from multiple perspectives, we speak in self's and others' many voices, and we endlessly create personalized expressive meanings as testimony to our own sense of being.