Volume 39, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Formulaicity and formulaic expressions in Japanese; Guest Editors: Tomoyuki Tsuchiya, Reijirou Shibasaki, Ryoko Suzuki, and Tsuyoshi Ono

Formulaic expressions pervade everyday language. While this has caught the attention of pedagogically oriented researchers due to its benefit in foreign language instruction, the centrality of formulaic expressions in actual language use, along with their emerging nature and plasticity, has only been marginally recognized and thus remains largely unexplored, especially in languages other than English. We propose to fill this gap by highlighting the cognitive and interactional basis of formulaicity in Japanese. We place full weight on formulaic language in actual use, which includes conversational discourse and social networking services such as Twitter posts. Each contribution highlights how formulaic expressions are based on and shaped by usage in context and how they are deployed in unfolding discourse.

This study investigates the use of the utterance-final tteyuu [ʔtejɯː], a combination of the quotative particle tte and the verb yuu (‘say’). Although its lexicalized status and utterance-final occurrence are commonly observed, we still know little about its real-time functions. The analysis of 120 examples in varied contexts shows its general usage to clarify something expressed in the prior talk, which is a type of repair practice. More importantly, the analysis reveals how the participants’ understanding of the ongoing speech activity and multimodal cues affect its use and interpretation. Furthermore, some specialized usages appear to motivate activity-bound pragmatic inferencing, leading to emergence of a new construction. The findings demonstrate that even those expressions that are fixed in one context are in flux; their functions and structures are always subject to negotiation and change through frequent use in new contexts. The study contributes to the understanding of a dynamic interplay between linguistic formulaicity and contextual factors.

In this study, we adopted the methodology of conversation analysis and interactional linguistics to investigate the use of shiranai and wakannai ‘I don’t know’ in data from (the Corpus of Everyday Japanese Conversation), a corpus of naturally occurring conversations. The quantitative and qualitative analyses of the sequential positions and the interactional functions of these two expressions revealed that shiranai is often used as a response to a question that explicitly requests knowledge status. Shiranai is also used in response to informing, soliciting more talk from the interlocutor. On the other hand, wakannai is more often used as a response to a question that requests information. Used with prosodic features such as elongation and laughter, both shiranai and wakannai sometimes convey the speaker’s affective stance towards the lack of knowledge. Furthermore, wakannai can be used as a discourse marker to mark the speaker’s low degree of commitment, sometimes working as a sequence-closing device.

In many languages, some turn formats are highly fixed and closely associated with specific interactional contexts, and thus function as formulas for particular actions. In Japanese, one of the recurring turn formats for referring to a problem found in the surrounding situation or other’s conduct is a clause ending with the contrastive particle kedo ‘but’. Based on close examination of examples from naturally-occurring conversations using the analytic framework of Interactional Linguistics, this article illustrates that the format with kedo is used to assign a deontic authority concerning an observed problem to the recipient and thereby leaving to the recipient a decision about how the problem should be dealt with and by whom. This shows a clear contrast with the turn format ending with yo , which is used to inform the recipients of what the speaker knows as a problem, and thereby to ask the hearers to register it.

Regarding the Japanese utterance-final construction tari site as a general extender, this paper discusses the innovative function of this formulaic expression, the non-final form of tari suru ‘and/or do’, to mark play stance. I argue that the sequential and interactional context where it is used provides the grounds for this construction to function as such, which contributes to building a play frame intersubjectively. General extenders such as English or something are highly pragmatic because, by offering a prototypical exemplar that precedes, the speaker invites the listener to infer the implied vague category. My analysis of tari site in naturally occurring Japanese conversations adds to the existing claim that English fixed expressions are employed to express stances in everyday conversation. Moreover, I found that the play stance marker tari site expresses the speaker’s positive self-presentation, in contrast to one of the previously claimed general extenders’ functions to convey hedges.

A systematic investigation into the first large scale Japanese conversation corpus reveals that repeated verbs (RVs) occurring in the response position tend to involve frequently used verbs such as aru ‘to exist’ and chigau ‘to differ’ (e.g., aru aru aru ). Further, longer RVs, those involving more repetition, are even more likely to occur with frequent verbs. In RVs, we find the verb having lost some of its lexical meaning and phonological substance (e.g., chigau > chiga ). RVs in fact behave more like pragmatic particles functioning as reactive tokens, i.e., short responses interjected by non-main speakers. RVs as reactive tokens are most clearly observed when they are used together with standard reactive tokens such as hai hai hai hai ‘yes, yes, yes, yes’, so(o) so(o) so(o) ‘yes, yes, yes’, and (i)ya (i)ya (i)ya ‘no, no, no’, which also exhibit repetition and phonological reduction. Verb repetition is thus better understood as a template to turn verbs into reactive tokens.

Relatively longer formulaic sequences are often subject to syntactic, lexical, and semantic variability, and this variability presumably connects to the development of constructional schemata and to language creativity. The present paper focuses on the formulaicity, variation, and communicative effects of the quotative phrase X ga itteta ‘X was saying’ in Japanese social media posts, whose situation would become fictional or less factual depending on the nature of the subject X . Twitter data suggest that X ga itteta with certain subjects (e.g., high school girls, cats, moms; see below) is more conventionalized compared to the counterpart Y-tte itteta ‘was saying that Y’, where Y is a quoted statement, with the same subject. Additionally, the construction accepts variation of surrounding elements to raise its fictional level. In Japanese online platforms, the schema X ga itteta and its formulaic instances possibly distance the quoter from the quoted statement and avoid arguments and criticisms.

This paper examines the use of punctuation in Japanese in order to investigate its role in formulaic expressions. Specifically, we will study the use of a comma before the copula complex dakedone at the end of an utterance. Typically, punctuation is considered a matter of style in written representations and is generally not included in studies about the structure of formulaic expressions. However, in a corpus-based study on language use on social media (e.g., blogs, Twitter, online forums), we found that this comma is frequently used for a distinct pragmatic effect. The patterns of use, both structural and functional, are observed to be regular and predictable, enough to suggest that the comma is part of a fixed formal complex that has a unique meaning, i.e., a construction. This in turn suggests that commas, even though they are punctuation, can be a formal resource that constitutes part of a formulaic expression.