Volume 25, Issue 4

In conversation, speakers often face problems in formulating and establishing referential expressions that are appropriate for the particular recipients to whom their utterances are addressed. This study investigates how participants in Japanese conversation deal with such referential problems in the course of constructing a turn at talk and how various grammatical practices used in this process shape the organization of turns and sequences in an orderly and recurrent manner. When referential problems occur, they regularly create tension between two orientations: On the one hand, in order to solve referential problems, speakers need to put on hold the construction of the turn with which they intend to execute the larger action. On the other hand, speakers’ orientation to executing the larger action motivates the progress of turn construction, which in turn motivates the minimization of a disruption to the ‘progressivity’ of the unfolding turn. By examining ways in which participants handle referential problems during turn construction, we show how participants organize their engagement with two potentially competing activities within an ongoing turn and how they mobilize grammar to organize their concurrent involvement in these competing activities.

This paper explores the use of a set of apparently synonymous contrastive conjunctions in Mandarin spoken discourse: zhishi , buguo , keshi , and danshi . Using Halliday’s (1994) analytical model of discourse, I examine their discourse-pragmatic and socio-pragmatic functions. The corpus contains two sets of data: one from casual conversation and another from radio/TV talk. I show that these seemingly synonymous conjunctions differ in several ways. Firstly, among these contrastive markers, keshi   is the marker that most frequently occurs in spoken discourse, particularly in casual conversation, whereas zhishi   is the one that occurs the least frequently. Secondly, danshi  tends to convey explicit contrast, while buguo and keshi express implicit contrast. Finally, buguo and keshi often appear in dispreferred responses expressing disagreement, while buguo seems to appear in formal speech situations, and keshi occurs in informal situations.

In this article we take the classic meaning of exemplum as a point of departure to show how examples are marked and used in oral discourse on ‘others’. The empirical material is a transcribed focus group interview with Swedish students talking about a trip to Warsaw. Examples may be marked in explicit ways but also in implicit ways. Some examples seem recognizable by their allusive nature, others by animated talk or quotations. Examples have various functions. They specify things but restrict them at the same time. They may serve as objectifications of an argument, they may mobilize associations, display attitudes, or indicate ‘types’ of persons or items. Some examples are virtual; they exemplify what could happen, or what never happened. Speakers may question another’s argument by referring to counterexamples, or request examples and thereby ‘disarm’ an opponent. Examples are also a target for protests. A dissatisfied listener may consider others’ examples as misleading, badly chosen, or too few. In general, examples serve as shortened induction. They are articulated in relation to something general, vague, or abstract. Typically, a speaker confirms, challenges, or in other ways elaborates an argument with the aid of examples, in order to convince and please the audience.