Introduction

Abstract

We are pleased to have this opportunity of publishing together a collection of studies of the use of East Asian languages (principally Chinese/Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean) in naturally occurring interactions of one kind or another. We hope that this special issue, and one to follow in the next volume of East Asian Pragmatics, will bring to a wider linguistics/pragmatics audience an appreciation of the breadth and vitality of research being conducted from a conversation analytic perspective, and that through these studies, readers who are unfamiliar with conversation analysis (CA) will come to understand what CA has to offer. We should make it clear right away that we solicited these contributions from scholars we knew were doing important and novel work on interactions in their respective languages, using CA to address significant topics and issues in pragmatics. There were so many more scholars we might have approached, if only the editors had allowed us another five special issues! But this selection of articles (which have been thoroughly peer reviewed) offers at least an entry into the wealth of CA research which is currently being done in the field of East Asian languages