Causal markers in Japanese and English conversations: A cross-linguistic study of interactional grammar

Abstract

The relationship between linguistic structure and the structure of social interaction has become the focus of a growing body of research (Duranti and Ochs 1979; Fox 1987; Ford 1993; Ono and Thompson to appear; Ochs, Schegloff, and Thompson in press, to name a few).l This research has been facilitated by the careful work of conversation analysts in defining the sorts of actions accomplished in human interaction and the recurrent shapes which those actions take (for reviews see Levinson 1983; Heritage 1984; Schiffrin 1988; recent collections include Atkinson and Heritage 1984; Button and Ixe 1987; Pomerantz 1993). The present study is a contribution to that research pro$am. We consider grammar in interaction from a cross-linguistic perspective, comparing the use of causal connectors in the management of disagreement in two languages which are distinct in their basic sentence structure: English, with SVO word order and Japanese, with SOV. Given the fundamental nature of many of the findings coming out of conversation analysis (CA), it is difficult to imagine a community of interactants that would not need to accomplish similar conversational tasks. Thus, it is likely that every linguistic ommunity has a set of regular practices for achieving turn-transfer (Sacks et al. 1974), for indicating attention and readiness for continuation (Schegloff 1982), for initiating and completing repair (Schegloff et al 7977; Fox, Hayashi and Jasperson 1993), and for agreeing or disagreeing (Pomerantz 1984a; Levinson 1983: 332-339; Sacks 1987). What is not yet understood is to what degree there exist similar strategies for performing these functions in different languages. Are there universal needs and constraints which, by force of the work to be done in interaction, have comparable realizations in any linguistic community regardless of typological and cultural differences? CA, of the ethnomethodological variety, has been criticized as too heavily English-based, and therefore, too closely tied to culture-specific interactional patterns to be a valid source for cross-linguistic and crclss-cultural generalizations (Gumperz