Matsumoto Kazuko. Intonation Units in Japanese Conversation: Syntactic, Informational, and Functional structures

John Benjamins, 2003. — xvii, 212 pages. — (Studies in Language Companion Series). — ISBN: 90-272-3075-7 / 1 58811 364 7.This book explores how speakers of Japanese organize their messages into coherent units as they jointly and interactively construct conversational discourse. Specifically, it investigates the syntactic, informational, and functional structures of intonation units (IUs) as basic units of discourse production and information flow in spoken communication. It addresses various research topics: clause vs. phrase centrality, relationship between IUs and clauses, functions of independent NPs, preferred argument/clause structure and transitivity, interrelationship among functional components, and the role of new and interactional information in the shaping of IU syntax. Overall, it tries to elucidate not only the preferred IU structures that are typical of the way Japanese speakers talk in connected discourse, but also possible relationships between the structures and their implications. Besides three main chapters discussing the results of quantitative and qualitative analyses, it also includes an introductory chapter comprehensively covering key issues in research on information flow in spoken discourse in general. Thus the book will be useful to all students and researchers of functional linguistics and discourse analysis.Information flow
Intonation units
Word order in Japanese spoken discourse
Purpose of the study
General research questions
Organization of the book
Information flow in spoken discourse
Topicality
Grounding
Information status
Units of information flow
Japanese intonation units
Constraints on information flow
Method of the study
Research questions and hypotheses
Data base
Data transcription
Intonation units produced in 16 conversations
Analysis of intonation units
Syntactic structure of the intonation unit in conversational Japanese
Data coding
Distribution of IU syntactic structure types unit
Distribution of post-predicate phrases among IU syntactic types
Clausal intonation units: Full clauses vs. semi-clauses
NP intonation units
Adjectival, adverbial, and mixed phrasal intonation units
Intonation units and clauses: Single-IU clauses vs. multi-IU clausesInformation structure of the intonation unit in conversational Japanese
Data coding
NPs, intonation units, and clauses
Preferred NP types: Grammatical roles, information statuses, and syntactic forms
Preferred information structure of the Japanese intonation unit
Preferred clause structure in conversational Japanese
Multi-IU clauses and the one new NP per IU constraintFunctional structure of the intonation unit in conversational Japanese
Data coding
Distribution of IU functional structure types
Preferred functional structure of the Japanese intonation unit
Multi-IU clauses and multifunctionalityJapanese intonation units: Syntactic, informational, and functional structures
Prospects