Arita2015

Arita2015
BibType	PHDTHESIS
Key	Arita2015
Author(s)	Yuki Arita
Title	Enactment in Japanese talk-in-interaction: Design, response, and sequential accomplishment
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Tag(s)	EMCA, Japanese, Enactment, Multimodality, Storytelling, Storyworld, Sequence organization, Projection
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Year	2015
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School	University of Wisconsin - Madison
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Abstract

This dissertation investigates an interactional phenomenon wherein participants enact themselves or others. Speakers produce enactments by utilizing specific designs of lexis, grammar, and prosody, as well as body orientation. Using Conversation Analysis (CA), this study examines how participants in Japanese talk-in-interaction design, deploy, and respond to stretches of talk as enactments and accomplish certain interactional goals with those enactments.

Conversation participants deploy enactments to depict a wide range of there-and-then situations. The present study focuses on two types of enactments: enactments of A-events and of B-events. A-events refer to information that speakers have more access to than recipients do, while B-events are information that recipients have more access to than speakers do (Labov & Fanshel, 1977). When tellers deploy A-event enactments in tellings, participants inevitably engage in coordinating the two layers of here-and-now and there-and-then sequence organizations. This study explicates how participants organize intersections between the two sequences. Participants also enact B-events to show their understanding of co-participants' tellings. These enactments demonstrate their producers' varied levels of understanding about B-events, and make tellers' (dis)confirmation a next relevant action. In pursuing an empirical examination of these types of enactments, this dissertation contributes to a better understanding of the interactional facets of enactments.

Throughout the analyses of the above types of enactments, this dissertation is also concerned with the projectability of Japanese enactments. The predicate-final structure of the Japanese language leads to "delayed projectability" (Fox, Hayashi, & Jasperson, 1996; Tanaka, 1999, 2000), and Japanese enactments are no exception: syntactic markings of enactments appear after the production of enactments and thus only retrospectively indicate preceding enactments. This study demonstrates that despite such syntactically delayed projectability, various linguistic and non-linguistic resources utilized before and during the production of enactments assist participants in comprehending Japanese enactments.?

Various research disciplines have investigated multifunctional characteristics of enactments from different analytical standpoints. This dissertation employs CA as its analytical framework to conduct an empirical inquiry regarding participants' own orientations toward enactments, and discusses how the findings of the present study contribute to enriching the understanding of the target phenomenon of enactments.

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