Questioning the clause as a crosslinguistic unit in grammar and interaction

This paper focuses on ‘clause’, a celebrated structural unit in linguistics, by comparing Finnish and Japanese, two languages which are genetically, typologically, and areally distinct from each other and from English, the language on the basis of which this structural unit has been most typically discussed. We first examine how structural units including the clause have been discussed in the literature on Finnish and Japanese. We will then examine the reality of the clause in everyday talk in these languages quantitatively and qualitatively; in our qualitative analysis, we focus in particular on what units are oriented to by conversational participants. The current study suggests that the degree of grammaticization of the clause varies cross-linguistically and questions the central theoretical status accorded to this structural unit.

The predicate as a locus of grammar and interaction in colloquial Indonesian

Descriptions of Indonesian usually take the clause as the starting point for analysing grammatical structure and rely on the notion of ellipsis to account for the way speakers actually use language in everyday conversational interaction. This study challenges the status of “clause” by investigating the structures actually used by Indonesian speakers in informal conversation and it demonstrates that the predicate, rather than the clause, plays a central role in the grammar of Indonesian conversation. The preponderance of predicates in the data that do not have explicit arguments suggests that this format is best viewed as the default. When a predicate is produced without overt arguments, reconstructing what arguments may have been elided is often ambiguous or indeterminate and seems to be irrelevant to speakers. An examination of turn-taking, overlap and incrementing in conversation also shows that predicates, rather than full clauses, are the grammatical format participants regularly orient to.

Conversation, Construction Grammar, and cognition

abstractRecent developments in grammatical theory seem to invite an integration of grammar and interaction; nevertheless, there are reservations on both sides. While some of these reservations can be traced to misconceptions, others are deeply rooted in the theoretical premises of each approach. The differences are, however, not very well understood; especially theoretical premises regarding the role of cognition in language use have been hindering a fruitful collaboration. Reinterpreting the results of Conversation Analysis (CA; cf. Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974; Sacks, 1992) in terms of Construction Grammar (Goldberg, 1995, 2006; Croft, 2001, Langacker, 2008) recasts the discursive practices identified in CA in terms of participants’ cognitive construals of the communicative situation, making the speaking subjects apparent in their strategies and conceptualizations of the interaction.

La construction quand on X, Y… : études syntaxiques et pragmatiques

One of our aims in this paper is thus to relate a syntactic analysis of spoken French to the analysis of French spoken in interaction. Therefore we study syntactic features in their sequential context and in relation to their interactional functions. Insofar and by the description of this single construction we propose a way to combine the analysis of grammar and interaction.