Deriving the socio-pragmatic meanings of the Japanese interactional particle ne

Journal of Pragmatics 44 (2012) 298–314

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Deriving the socio-pragmatic meanings of the Japanese interactional particle ne Emi Morita * Department of Japanese Studies, National University of Singapore, AS4 #3-29, 9 Arts Link, Singapore 117570, Singapore

A R T I C L E I N F O

A B S T R A C T

Article history: Received 5 June 2011 Received in revised form 7 October 2011 Accepted 14 December 2011 Available online 31 January 2012

In my previous work, I argued that the use of ne in conversation explicitly creates a sanctioned space in which participants can negotiate issues of interactive alignment in the moment (Morita, 2005). Many sociolinguistic, psycholinguistic, and cognitive linguistic studies of ne, however, offer a wide range of higher-level interpretations that they claim speakers and listeners attribute to this particle, such that speakers use ne to mark ‘‘sharedness of information’’, ‘‘politeness’’, ‘‘femininity’’, or ‘‘over-friendliness’’ – none of which seem to be relevant to the basic organizational function performed by ne itself. The purpose of this paper is to show how my previous analysis of ne as a negotiation tool for resolving contingency problems can be understood with respect to the impressionistic interpretations provided by other theorists. I argue that impressions of differential stance taking are only possible when participants can rely on ne’s fundamental function at the micro-level interaction as their base. Such thematization of interactive alignment may then lead to impressionistic hearings that invoke concepts of higher-order sociality, such as ‘‘politeness’’, ‘‘neediness’’, ‘‘coerciveness’’, and (according to certain ideologies) ‘‘femininity’’. I thus attempt to show here how these seemingly incongruous understandings of the Japanese interactional particle ne can be simultaneously correct. ß 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Interactional particle Japanese particle ne Participation framework Alignment Language ideology

1. Introduction The interactional particle ne is one of the most frequently occurring lexical items in the Japanese language, despite the fact it carries neither referential meaning nor indicates grammatical relations. In Morita (2005, 2008), I examined ne’s conversational functions and argued that it is used by speakers to explicitly create a space in the ongoing spate of talk for recipients to display their alignment (or disalignment) with any project – be it the initiation of a new conversational sequence or the perpetuation of the present positioning within the participation framework – that is in the process of being put into play at that exact juncture. Such ‘‘alignment’’ is not mere ‘‘agreement’’, as will become apparent in the data we will examine here; this same data will also reveal the need for its persistent negotiation by conversationalists. Instead, for a proposed joint course of action, ‘‘alignment’’ is the most basic and fundamental prerequisite to be negotiated before accomplishing any higher-order social interaction. Yet even here, the commonplace use of the word is misleading, for the type of interactional alignment that I am referring to is not a binary decision made by a proposee to a proposer but is rather a coaxial state of action orientation that must be perpetually accomplished by all participants involved. The joint action orientations of starting and ending conversational sequences, assuming and accepting participation framework roles,

* Tel.: +65 6516 6641; fax: +65 6776 1409. E-mail address: [email protected]. 0378-2166/$ – see front matter ß 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2011.12.004

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and signaling and identifying possible trajectory-changing moves, among others, must be continually negotiated in realtime during the course of conversational interactions, making the ongoing joint alignment of all parties involved an omnirelevant concern – and one that becomes particularly acute at moments when a new sequence or framework is being proposed. As I have argued earlier, ne is a lexical resource that Japanese conversationalists use to explicitly indicate that such alignment to joint action orientation (and not merely to the propositional content of the talk) is a relevant concern at the moment it is deployed, which, again, is why we see it so frequently deployed both as an attention solicitor (Cook, 1990, 1992; Tanaka, 2000) and at potentially trajectory-changing contingency points (Morita, 2005). However, most linguistics studies of ne focus exclusively on ‘‘sentence-final’’ ne (e.g., Katagiri, 2007), despite the fact that ne has been found to occur almost anywhere within a turn (Morita, 2005). This focus has led to the understanding of ne as primarily an attitudinal and propositional marker (e.g., Cheng, 1987; McGloin, 1990; Katagiri, 2007) or as a cognitive marker of ‘‘sharedness’’ of information (Kamio, 1997; Maynard, 1989) rather than as an activity alignment and contingency-management device. There also exists a wide range of sociolinguistic interpretations of ne, which I will discuss below. What I will attempt to do in this paper is to show how all of these understandings of ne can simultaneously be correct. In short, I want to argue here that while the basic function of ne is for securing the alignment of action orientation (and, hence, for negotiating both conversational sequence and participation framework contingency issues), the resulting semiotics of ‘‘alignment’’ that become indexed by such uses of ne give rise to various impressionistic and even ‘‘ideological’’ interpretations among conversationalists. In the following section, I will briefly review some of the semiotic interpretations of ne that have been offered by both professional linguists and ordinary conversationalists. 2. Semiotic interpretations of ne

[TD$INLE]

The thing that has been bothering me is that my boyfriend, who is 30 years old, the same age as me, uses ‘‘ne’’ in his emails, as in: ‘‘We had good time today ne’’ or ‘‘Because you have been saying that you wanted to go ne.’’ Honestly, I feel like telling him: ‘‘How old are you?’’ or ‘‘Are you a girl from the old generation?’’ But I cannot tell him this, since I am afraid that it would hurt him (because he uses it so regularly). But because he is a grown-up man, I wish that he wouldn’t use it. Posted on March 30, 2009 at 12:11 on Hatsugen Komachi The above passage is taken from a posting to an online discussion forum entitled ‘‘Words that bother me’’ on Hatsugen Komachi, a Japanese website that is mainly targeted to women. Here, a 30-year-old Japanese female reports that she is irritated by her boyfriend’s use of the particle ne in his email messages. She associates the word with the speech style of young girls (and young girls of an earlier generation, moreover) and claims that it is therefore not appropriate in the speech of a contemporary 30-year-old man. Despite the fact that ne has been documented to appear frequently in the speech patterns of both male and female Japanese of all ages (Ide and Yoshida, 1999; Morita, 2005), the use of the particle ne has in fact often been associated with ‘‘a feminine speech style’’ by some linguists (e.g., Ogawa, 2006). Indeed, Mizumoto’s (2006) study on women’s speech styles treats certain particles (such as ne and yo) as key features with which to measure ‘‘femininity’’ and claims that when directly attached to a noun or to the nominalizer no, instances of ne have been characterized as ‘‘feminine particles’’ (though there is no clear explanation offered as to why ne is considered to be ‘‘feminine’’ in certain syntactic positions but not in others). However, as noted in my naturalistic conversation data (Morita, 2005), I found that in terms of frequency, men and women (as well as children of both sexes) equally use ne; statistics compiled by others (Ide and Yoshida, 1999:465) also report that ne is used almost equally by both males and females. Such findings thus raise the legitimate question as to why linguists (such as the ones cited above) and the everyday language user and author of the Hatsugen Komachi posting all have a sense that ne is somehow ‘‘women’s talk’’ or ‘‘feminine’’ sounding. In this paper, I want to suggest the reasoning that leads to such a conclusion and show how linguistic activity on the fundamental turn-taking and interactional level over time becomes heard as indexing certain socio-ideological identities. Examination of the various meanings attributed to the interactional particle ne offers us rich resources for doing so in that so many different and, to native Japanese speakers, extremely plausible interpretations of its ‘‘impressionistic’’ aspects have been offered. In the 1960s, for example, the use of ne (together with other particles like yo and sa) was considered to be ‘‘vulgar’’, and children of certain districts in Japan were actively discouraged by the educational system from using such particles (Hashimoto, 2002). However, in an interpretation that could hardly be more contrary, Ikeda (1995) reports that the use of ne is related to ‘‘politeness’’ and that it is not so much used for ‘distancing’ (as many Japanese polite forms are) but instead for cultivating ‘‘intimacy’’. For example, Ikeda argues that ‘‘it will rain tomorrow ne’’ sounds softer than the same utterance without ne and

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that when giving advice, such as ‘‘you should go to the hospital ne’’, or condolence, such as ‘‘that is too bad ne’’, and accompanied by a combination of certain intonations and facial expressions, ‘‘ne gives more feeling of sympathy and consideration towards the recipient’’ (Ikeda, 1995:103). Thus, Ikeda attributes ‘‘intimate’’ and ‘‘positive’’ communication styles to ne users, regardless of their gender. Interestingly, Ikeda adds that the ‘‘overuse’’ of ne can, however, sound ‘‘too intrusive’’ or result in the impression of an ‘‘over-familiar attitude’’ because, he claims, ‘‘the use of ne, regardless of its positions within the utterance, forces its recipient to give back-channeling tokens, and makes it hard to disagree with’’ (ibid). Yet, other psychological effects associated with ne are suggested by various linguists. Some studies (e.g., McGloin, 1990; Onoeda, 2004) claim that ne is a marker of ‘‘rapport’’. Cook has suggested that ne indexes ‘‘affective common ground’’ and that the speaker can use it to solicit, confirm, or refer to ‘‘shared feelings’’ (1992:519). In this sense, ne works as a tool to establish ‘‘a cooperative relationship between conversation participants’’ (Cook, 1990:42). Similarly, in an examination of young women’s letter writing styles, Kataoka (1995) argued that ne ‘‘helps to consolidate common feelings towards a narrated event at the end of a topic, ultimately establishing solidarity between the addresser and addressee’’ (1995:437). As can be seen from the above examples, there are a wide range of interpretations and social meanings attributed to the particle ne, from ‘‘vulgar’’ to ‘‘polite’’, from ‘‘solidarity’’ to ‘‘presumptuousness’’ and from ‘‘gender neutral’’ to ‘‘specifically feminine’’. Moreover, I feel secure in saying that ‘native speaker intuition’ among Japanese would assent to many (if not all) of these sometimes contradictory claims when presented with a variety of naturally occurring ne-containing utterances. As the statement by the poster in the online forum shows, instances of the use of ne are often judged ‘‘appropriate’’ or ‘‘inappropriate’’ by Japanese speakers and have thus become part of Japan’s meta-pragmatic discourse. The following questions then emerge: if there are so many competing but seemingly equally plausible possible interpretations of ne, what precise aspect of its ‘‘appropriateness’’ is being judged by speakers in any given instance, and how have these particular interpretations (of presumptuousness or of solidarity, for example) become the relevant ones in the contexts in which they are heard? In short, if ne is, as I will argue below, primarily functioning to fine-tune contingency on the turn-taking (and even sub-turn-taking) level, where do such widely heard ‘higher-level’ interpretations of this otherwise denotation-free particle come from? Again, I believe that the very fact that both professional linguists and everyday Japanese speakers can and do read so many different and specific meanings into the use of ne indicates not a ‘misunderstanding’ on the part of these analysts but rather alerts us to a genuine and important aspect of this interactional particle that requires an explanation. One problem for analysts, however, is that such various ‘impressionistic’ interpretations of ne may each be valid only for certain cases of its expression (and in specifically delimited social contexts) and therefore would not be applicable as valid explanations in countless other examples. To discover how this single ‘‘definition-less particle’’ comes to be associated with such higherorder impressionistic effects such as presumptuousness or politeness, I believe we must first look to the micro-level of the conversational action sequences in which ne appears to determine exactly what issue in maintaining conversational alignment and interaction is specifically being dealt with by participants at the conversational juncture at which ne is being deployed. Armed with this knowledge, we can then attempt to trace the ways in which such interactional activity lends itself to particular impressionistic (and perhaps even ideological) ‘‘hearings’’ rather than presuming a single sociolinguistic ‘‘meaning’’ of ne, such as ‘‘femininity’’ or ‘‘overfriendliness’’ a priori. Thus, the goal of the present paper is to connect my previous analyses of ne (Morita, 2005) as a tool for negotiating potential contingency problems on the level of turn development to an explication of how and why such ‘impressionistic interpretations’ of ne may be legitimately derivable from such activity for both language users and linguistic analysts. To do so, I will first demonstrate how ne specifically deals with contingency problems in turn development. We will then see how, depending on its sequential position and action type, the explicit marking of ‘‘alignment’’ as an interactional contingency concern will work to propose a certain type of participation framework. I will then provide analyses of how issues of category membership and social ideology may be operationalized through the (co-)construction of such participation frameworks as well as how these ne-initiated frameworks may give rise to their variously proposed sociolinguistic interpretations. 3. Ne as a device to deal with alignment contingency problems In this section, I will argue that the basic function of ne in conversation is to provide the opportunity to explicitly coconstruct an aligned participation framework. An example of this follows in the data segment below wherein the next relevant sequence action is seen to be not properly understood by the turn recipient, and ne is thus deployed by the speaker to deal with this contingency problem. In the excerpt below, three people – the relatives K, S and Y – are eating together and conversing at the dinner table. S lives in a different prefecture than K and Y, who therefore do not see him very often. In a stretch of talk occurring prior to the segment below, S explained that he does not know his current neighborhood very well because he leaves home very early and comes home very late. Sixteen turns of talk about the area in which S lives then follow, which is the context in which the following segment begins1:

1

For abbreviations for Japanese gloss and transcription convention, please see Appendix A.

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(1)

[New Year ]

1

S:

dakara apaato so

ooin desu

301

yo.

apartment many PRED:POL IP

‘So, there are many apartment buildings.’ 2

Y:

fuun.

3!

K:

(

‘I see.’ ) kurai toki ni uchi dete dark 4

kura(h)kuna(h)tte=

time at home leave:TE dark-become:TE

=ka(h)ette kuru(h)n return:TE come

da(h).

SE PRED

‘(You) leave when it is still dark and come home when it gets dark. 5

(.6)

6!

[((looks up)) ne [:? IP

7!

S:

[((looks up))

[soo ‘yes’

8

(.) de

ima nanka makkura

and now TOP

desu

yo.

EMPH-dark PRED:POL IP

‘And now, it’s completely dark.’ 9

K:

un,

soo desu

yeah so

yo ne, goji

PRED-POL IP IP

nante ne:.

five.o’clock TOP

IP

‘Yeah, it must be ne, (if it is) five o’clock ne.’

When S is explaining his neighborhood to K and Y in line 1, he is facing Y, who is sitting to the left of S. As selected by S’s eye gaze, Y responds to S in line 2. K, who is sitting on the right side of S, then self-selects as the next speaker. However, K’s talk here is not thematically contiguous with the ongoing discussion of the details of S’s neighborhood; rather, he orthogonally brings the topic back to S’s busy life. Although K’s talk in line 3 is about S, topically, it was not immediately conjoint to S’s adjacent talk in line 1; instead, he attempts to return to S’s own words from 16 lines prior. In addition, K is simultaneously trying to pick up some food with his chopsticks as he produces this talk and thus fails to select S (or any other particular recipient) as the next speaker through the use of eye gaze (Goodwin, 1981). When K’s talk reaches its completion, there is a short silence (line 5). Yet as it becomes clear from K’s subsequent move in line 6, K was not designing his talk in lines 3–4 as some kind of ‘‘post-mortem’’ self-talk (Schegloff, 2007:142–148) but as a conversational turn that requires another participant’s uptake. An alignment problem in the ongoing participation framework of the talk is now observable precisely at this juncture. K explicitly thematizes this problem and marks as a hearably accountable silence in the talk by moving his gaze towards S and adding the single-lexeme increment ‘‘ne’’ (line 6). As soon as K’s ne is vocalized, S does three things in response: (1) in line 7, he brings his gaze to meet K’s; (2) he then immediately aligns to the participation framework suggested by K’s ‘‘uptake’’-soliciting ne by delivering a contiguously placed acknowledgement token (‘‘soo’’), which provides the (delayed and then requested) second pair part to K’s neincremented line 4; (3) finally, using the conjunctive de (‘and’) in line 8, S explicitly connects his subsequent talk to now align with the orthogonal change of topic direction that K had initiated in lines 3–4, which had gone unaligned to in line 5, thereby occasioning K’s use of the alignment negotiation resource ne in line 6. S’s complex realignment response in lines 7–8 shows that the problem of the abrupt discontinuation of talk occurring in line 6 was not due to a hearing problem; rather, his response in line 7 shows that S clearly heard and understood what K said in lines 3–4. However, because the precise participation framework of the moment had become ambiguous at the time of K’s orthogonal shift (note that the English-language second-person pronoun indicated in parentheses in the gloss in line 4 is not actually articulated in the talk, which accords with Japanese convention), the problem of establishing the alignment of a new participation framework had arisen. As a resource for solving this problem, ne here works as a re-completer of K’s turn in line 3 and attempts (successfully in this case) to reset a participation framework that was not successfully established in line 5. For while K’s pre-ne eye gaze in line 6 helps to display the selection of his talk’s recipient, it is his deployment of the interactional particle ne into the stream of talk itself that explicitly provides for the recipient a sanctioned conversational space in which to express his alignment to the proposed participation framework. The above data show that the production of a meaningful sentence alone is not sufficient to facilitate interaction. Unless a participation framework projected by the talk is understood by its recipients, who in turn recognizes that framework and participate in it (or against it) as such, talk may just hang in the air without continuing. The following example similarly

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shows how ne deals with the absence of participant response. This example is drawn from a conversation between a threeyear-old child (C), his mother (M) and his grandmother (G). (2)

[Shoota ]

1

G:

gohan tabeta? meal

Shoochan

eat-PAST (name)

‘Have you eaten, Shoochan?’ 2

C:

u [n ] ‘yes’

3!

M:

[mada]

ne? ((looking at C))

not-yet IP ‘not yet ne?’ 4!

G:

obaachan

to

isshoni

tabeyoo ka? (.2) ne.

grandmother with together eat-VOL Q

IP

‘Shall we eat together with grandma? (.2) Ne.’ 5

C:

6!

G:

(.2) [((nod looking at G)) [ne. obaachan IP

to

isshoni

tabe [[yoo ne::?

grandmother with together eat-

VOL IP

‘ne. Let’s eat together with grandma ne.’ 7

C:

[[((nod looking at G))

In the above example, the grandmother (G) asks her grandchild (C) whether he has eaten (line 1). Although he says ‘‘yes’’ in line 2, his mother (M) provides a fabricated response as a correct version of the answer in line 3. At this exact moment in the data, M specifically looks at C (and not at G) so as to display the fact that she is not responding to G’s question as its designated recipient. Significantly, however, M then also creates an interactional space for C’s aligned participation in this ‘‘answering’’ activity by adding ne; by directing her eye gaze, M indicates to C that this interactional space is made specifically for him to align to and to participate in next. Mothers often facilitate interaction by supplying responses on behalf of their young children (cf. Schieffelin, 1990). However, using ne here to create a space for the child to actively participate even after such a ventriloquized ‘‘response’’ has been given, M’s action demonstrates to the child that such ventriloquy is only a temporarily supplied model and that for a real participation framework to be established, the child must still participate. In this data, it is interesting to note that even though the child had previously responded otherwise, G takes M’s response in line 3 as the correct version to the question at line 1 and suggests having lunch together with C in line 4, extending to C the opportunity to participate in this proposed joint activity. In much the same way that K did in the previous data, G finishes her sentence and after a brief pause, adds ne to re-complete her turn and to explicitly provide an interactional space for C to act next within the proposed participation framework. G is now met by another silence from C at this juncture; G, however, adds another ne but this time, overlaps it with C’s nod, a display of agreement. Finally, when G sees that C has aligned to her proposed participation framework, she changes the format of her utterance from a ‘‘question’’ in line 4 to an ‘‘alignment-expected’’ suggestion in line 6 by dropping the question particle ka and by adding a prolonged and rising intonation ne. Interestingly, however, G’s suggestion of eating together had already been accepted by the child in line 5. What kind of function does ne then have here, where an aligned participation framework seems to have already been confirmed? And in what way could the participants make sense of this utterance design, given that ne here seems to be interactionally redundant? As we examine the data analyses that comprise the rest of this paper, I will argue in more detail that G’s persistent use of ne here works to thematize C’s ‘‘alignment’’ as a relevant and interactionally negotiable issue – not just to the particular action sequence and participation framework here under consideration on the turn level but also on the higher-level order of participatory alignment to interactive social activities and to the practice of negotiating jointly co-constructed participation frameworks. As we see exhibited here, scaffolded training in the micro-choreography of such basic human give-and-take teaches children the interactive ‘‘alignment’’ skills that are prerequisites for building up to the kinds of ‘‘affect and aligned stance-taking displays’’ of ‘‘politeness’’, ‘‘agreement’’, ‘‘solidarity’’ and ‘‘rapport building’’ that have come to be associated with the use of the particle ne. In this section, however, my goal has simply been to show that ne deals fundamentally with local next-ness problems and not, as in the first instance, with larger social meanings implicated by the social setting. Rather, data such as the above show that occurrences of ne are highly sensitive to turn sequential development (see Tanaka, 2000), which is why it is so frequently deployed as a re-completer and that a ne-marked segment of talk is often used to draw attention to the juncture at which turn problems of alignment have occurred (or are foreseeable) in the ongoing participation framework. Proposing how such a functional resource for the micro-alignment of conversational sequence organizations’ participation frameworks give rise to

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more ‘ideological’ participation frameworks, such as group inclusion and social category memberships, is the goal of this paper. Thus, we must now turn to an examination of the function of the ways in which ne’s alignment-highlighting function may also be appropriated for use on the supra-turn taking level. 4. Ne as a device to index discourse-level alignment concerns Studies in Conversation Analysis (CA) have long revealed the micro-level social order in peoples’ everyday interactions. Findings on conversational sequence organization (Sacks et al., 1974:13; Schegloff, 2007) have shown the basic organizational interaction order towards which conversationalists orient. In particular, responses to an action embody either preferred or dispreferred values, and it is the preferred response that generally furthers the activity most transparently and least disruptively (Schegloff, 2007:59). Thus, certain types of talk-in-interaction normatively suggest and ‘‘expect’’ certain types of next action. For example, when someone asks a question, an answer to that question is expected to follow, and conversationalists hold each other ‘‘accountable’’ for such actions (as well as for their non-occurrence). Schegloff and Sacks (1973) have termed such sequences adjacency pairs and have shown that attention to such systemic organization exerts a powerful influence over the ways that speakers and listeners design their turns at talk. However, the always potentially problematic issue of ‘sequential relevancy’ that conversationalists face as they go about the moment-to-moment business of actively co-constructing the back-and-forth of unscripted conversation is not simply limited to the successful alignment of these normatively paired actions, which, again, much CA work has shown. For example, Schegloff and Sacks (1973:296) have shown that even after the successful provision of a solicited second pair part, more ‘sequential implicativeness’ remains in play, as the turn after the question–answer sequence is the most normatively relevant place for the questioner to display the acceptableness (or lack thereof) of the answer (Heritage, 1984). Utilizing various resources, such as eye gaze, intonation, and/or grammar, conversationalists design their talk’s turns in a way that the recipient can recognize such ‘‘implicated sequence structure’’ from the design of the talk proffered and can then successfully orient their own next actions to fit in with (and to advance) these normative participation frameworks. Schegloff (1996:95) has shown that a turn’s developing action-shape is often projectable from its grammatical components and prosody and that recipients can and do respond with normatively appropriate relevant next actions without waiting to hear the end of the current action in progress. Moreover, by actively and appropriately producing such ‘‘relevant next actions’’, recipients are publicly displaying their ‘incarnate’ understandings of the participation frameworks that are currently in play (Schegloff and Sacks, 1973:296–298).2 In fact, it has been shown that participants often start the next turn before the end of the ongoing turn reaches completion in an effort to either minimize the gap (e.g., Sacks et al., 1974:707) or to forestall the action to that which is normatively due to be completed at the moment when the emerging action becomes projectable (Lerner, personal communication). Thus, although our first two examples showed how ne can explicitly alert interlocutors to potential alignment problems, we can also observe instances wherein interlocutors produce the relevant realignment actions even before ne is pronounced. The example below illustrates one such case. (3)

[T&N ]

Ring x 3 1

T: hai Terada de [su. yes (Name) PRED ‘yes, (this is) Terada.’

2!

N:

go [[men ne?

[a isogashii toko a busy

place sorry

IP

‘ah, sorry when you are busy ne.’ 3

4

T:

!

[[aa i.e. i.e. oh no no ‘oh, no, no.’

N: ano

sa, kinoo

well IP

doomo ariga [to ne?

yesterday very

thanks

IP

‘well, thank you for yesterday ne.’ 5

T:

[aa iie. oh no ‘oh, no.’

2 Returning to the data in Example 1, for instance, if S had realized that K had selected him as the next speaker through the widely recognized technique of fixing eye gaze, it is quite conceivable that S would have provided K with ‘‘uptake’’ at the relevant point at the end of line 4, at which point K’s deployment of ne to elicit the ‘‘missing’’ response would not have been necessary.

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In this excerpt, we find that ne is added by the same speaker both to the apology ‘gomen’ and to the expression of thanks ‘arigato’. However, the occurrence of ne here seems at first glance to be non-consequential for the recipient in terms of speaker selection and timing of turn taking, as the recipient of the talk can be seen to be able to project the emerging action from the in-progress elements of N’s talk (e.g., N’s ‘‘you are busy’’ projects an upcoming ‘‘apology’’, while her ‘‘for yesterday’’ and ‘‘doomo’’ projects an upcoming ‘‘thank you’’). T thus displays her ability to anticipate the emerging participation framework and to minimize the inter-turn gap in talk by providing a sequentially appropriate response at line 3, prior to N’s articulation of the interactional alignment particle ne. This excerpt shows us that developing participation frameworks projected in ongoing talks are often visible to the participants and that alignment to such frameworks (and to action sequences that they entail as normative) can and do often happen regardless of the deployment or non-deployment of ne. Thus, although ne can be used to mark an interactional juncture as a relevant alignment place or to explicitly choose the next speaker as we have seen in the first two data sets above, in the present example, the participants do not seem to be relying on ne to explicitly create the interactional space to construct an aligned participation framework. How then, we may ask, are N’s seemingly ‘extraneous’ ne’s here different than K’s and G’s in previous examples? Do N’s uses of ne serve any turn-level ‘function’ here, as do K’s and G’s? Or are they doing the higher-order ‘‘display affect’’ work that has so often been attributed to them, such as expressing ‘‘an indication of intimacy’’ or ‘‘a caring attitude’’? Semantically and pragmatically, both the phrases ‘‘gomen’’ and ‘‘arigato’’ are acceptable forms on their own and have selfcomplete pragmatic functions (apologizing and thanking, respectively). In this sense, whether lines 2 and 4 contained ne or not, it seems that participants would still be able to understand the participation framework being projected by the ongoing talk, just as T does here. Yet, although semantically and pragmatically there is no difference between ‘‘gomen’’ and ‘‘gomen ne’’, Japanese speakers do make a deliberate choice on whether to add ne to such lexemes in any given instance; thus, the question becomes the following: what other circumstances of the current talk-in-interaction, other than those we looked at in Examples 1 and 2, may be relevant for deciding to deploy the interactional alignment particle ne? My analysis proposes that when the relevant next action being projected can already be understood from the talk’s sequential implication (e.g., a first assessment makes the second assessment as relevant next; an invitation makes acceptance as relevant next, etc.), using ne to draw attention to potential alignment problems in the participation framework is unnecessary. However, because the function of ne is associated with the notion of interactional alignment in general, speakers may also – as here – add ne to their talk as a way of highlighting their own ‘‘concerns’’ with the current actions being instantiated by their talk. For instance, in the above excerpt, although the projected participation framework of the talk would be clear even without ne, adding ne functions as a vehicle whereby N can display explicit ‘‘concern’’ regarding the impact of her talk’s actions upon the present interpersonal alignment between herself (as interrupter and beneficiary) and T (as the person interrupted and bestower of the benefit). Embodying such concerns with the alignment-relevant interactional particle ne, N can explicitly display her due regard of social disquietude regarding these actions – a disquietude that T, in turn, normatively acts to ameliorate in lines 3 and 5. Specifically, in an apology sequence, the apologizer seeks the apologizee’s pardon for a (real or imagined) wrong done by the apologizer. Adding ne to such an action highlights not only one’s concern regarding whether the recipient of the apology will accept one’s apology but also one’s disquietude with the possibility that one has caused harm or disalignment to the harmony of the relationship. Such an explicit display of concern regarding joint interpersonal alignment would work as a display of sociality – as does the apologizee’s preferred response, which, in this case, does not put the individual in the unequal position of ‘‘giving pardon’’ but instead lessens the apologizer’s own disquietude for having introduced disalignment (again, whether real or imagined) into the relationship. To accomplish this, the apologizee will often assure the apologizer that an apology is not even necessary. The preferred response – at least in such purely ‘‘formal’’ and ‘‘polite’’ apology sequences as the one considered here – is to disalign to the apology. Notice, for instance, that T does not give N a reciprocal ne in her response, ‘‘rejecting’’ the notion that there is any real disalignment issue at play in the moment between them. Similarly, T’s attempt in line 3 to deflect N’s apology by starting early is another overt indication of non-alignment to N’s proposed participation framework of ‘‘doing an apology’’ for an alleged disalignment. In short, the apologizer’s seeking of ‘‘re-’’alignment is itself disaligned from as an unnecessary action, sending the message that the interpersonal alignment between participants was never, in fact, breached or threatened by the actions of the apologizer.3 In this example, we can detect how the use of ne as a resource for interactional alignment on the turn-taking level can and will be exploited by conversationalists to highlight interactional alignment concerns on the level of the ongoing discourse. Here, ne’s explicit indication of the speaker’s concern regarding the potential impact of the action sequences that are in the process of being launched itself becomes an interactional theme within the conversation, and its negotiation in lines 2, 3, 4 and 5 presents a textbook case of ‘‘politeness’’ sequences that themselves revolve around alignment concerns and that, over time, may aggregate to impressions of ‘‘sociality’’, ‘‘rapport’’ and ‘‘interdependence’’. Indeed, in the following example (featuring the same participants as in Example 2), the recipient of a ne-marked action takes the opportunity to respond to it by marking her own action with ne in return.

3

I am deeply grateful to one of my anonymous reviewers for insightfully suggesting the direction of the above analysis.

E. Morita / Journal of Pragmatics 44 (2012) 298–314

(4)

[Shoota]

1!

C:

ano sa oshoogatsu(ki)nen ITJ IP New Year

kooen ikoo

memorial park

305

ne?

go-VOL IP

‘uh, let’s go to the park (memorial park) on New Year ne.’ 2!

M:

=ikoo

ne:. shoowa kinen kooen [ne?

go-VOL IP (name

of the park)

IP

‘yes let’s ne. Showa memorial park ne.’ 3

C:

[u:n ‘yes.’

4

M:

omoshirokatta ne [::? fun-PAST

IP

‘it was fun ne.’ 5

C:

[u:n. ‘yes.’

Here, just as the ne in line 1 allows the first speaker to express his stance regarding what he hopes will be his interlocutor’s alignment to the proposed participation framework, the second speaker also uses ne to indicate her own fully aligned stance towards the successful establishment of that same participation framework. Such explicit expression of mutual concern can thus be heard to strengthen their aligned participation framework, for the very act of explicit indication of alignment as a relevant concern not only highlights the expected next action type but also highlights the next speaker as an active co-participant in the ongoing activity. The participants repeatedly exchanging ne here brings special attention to the building of the participation framework, thereby making it hearable as a type of stance taking – which it is, though in a fundamental and interactively accomplished sense (as opposed to a unilateral ‘psychological’ sense). Ne publically displays speakers’ solicitude regarding the importance of ‘alignment’ issues in the ongoing interaction, and such activity, in turn, implicates the use of ne in such impressionistic observations of ‘‘intimacy’’ or ‘‘building solidarity’’. Let us recapitulate what we have seen thus far. Ne has been shown to be a useful device for calling explicit attention to issues of alignment within the participation framework. When the recipient of a directed conversational action does not respond for whatever reason, a speaker’s re-completing of the prior turn by adding ne explicitly creates a response opportunity for the recipient to explicitly align to the ongoing sequence of the talk. In situations where it is not only the turn taking but also the building of aligned participation frameworks that is at issue, the explicit display of sociality becomes a part of the project of the discourse in progress between interlocutors. Here, too, ne can be similarly relied upon to highlight alignment concerns and utilized for explicit negotiation between participants. Building the participation framework in these instances now becomes an actual agenda of the discourse rather than merely an invisible prerequisite to the discourse. Lastly, when issues of alignment over and above the discourse level itself are under negotiation (such as in Example 4, where the participants are together engaged in making plans), speakers can similarly add ne to explicitly thematize the coconstructive nature of the proposed participation framework itself. At this level, a participant’s overt display of alignment towards the participation framework itself can also manifest as his or her ‘‘affiliative stance’’ towards the ongoing activity (e.g., a participant’s ‘‘agreement’’ to an invitation). Thus, a discussion of Stivers’ analytical distinction between alignment and affiliation is relevant here. Stivers (2008) observes that during storytelling sequences, participants deploy different response tokens to indicate their ever-shifting stances towards the ongoing activity. She argues that vocal continuers merely support the progress of the telling, while head nods claim sympathy with (and, in her words, ‘‘access’’ to) the teller’s own stance towards the events reported. Stivers claims that the former is a resource for displaying alignment (to the ongoing activity and, in my analysis, to the participation framework it entails), while the latter is a resource for displaying affiliation with the storyteller’s evaluative stance. Stivers also notes an example in her data showing that ‘‘nods during storytellings are both aligning with the telling activity and, through a claim of access, affiliative’’ (2008:51). The term alignment as I have been using it in my analysis of ne obviously does not contradict Stivers’ use of the term. What is relevant to note, however, is that while the Japanese conversational resource ne can function like a ‘‘continuer’’ to explicitly mark alignment to the participation framework as an immediately relevant issue (as we have seen in Examples 1 and 2), similar to Stivers’ ‘‘head nods’’, it can also become a resource for displaying interpersonal affiliation when the building of an aligned participation framework itself becomes the agenda of the ongoing activity. For example, in an assessment sequence where ‘‘agreement’’ is the preferred response (Pomerantz, 1978, 1984a), participants’ explicit display that the co-construction of an aligned participation framework is the relevant concern at that moment is doing more than simply ‘‘agreeing’’ to the correctness of the first assessment. It is also expressing the speakers’ appeal to establish an affiliative social relationship. When such a stance is displayed, aligning to that displayed stance may also become a way of expressing affiliation.

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In the following section, I wish to draw out some implications that explicitly drawing attention to the participation framework – whether on the level of the turn, the discourse, or the activity that conversationalists are currently engaged in co-constructing – has for the establishment of local ‘‘category membership’’. 5. Establishing membership through the negotiation of a participation framework In talk-in-interaction, conversationalists set up participation frameworks, such as storyteller/story-recipient, inviter/ invitee, etc., in order for conversational interaction to go smoothly so that participants understand what participation framework they have been asked to be part of at any time. The deployment of ne on the turn-taking level highlights the interactional space where the recipient of a ne-marked action can show his or her stance towards the in-progress building of the participation framework – and, as we have seen, it can also highlight a speaker’s expectations of her recipient regarding their joint building of the participation framework. While such aligned participation frameworks are normatively oriented, the relevant participation frameworks that are at play during the course of a conversation can and do shift during the interaction, and the interactional space created by ne by no means guarantees one’s recipient’s alignment. Through her actions, the speaker may propose a particular participation framework, but the recipient of that talk may wish to operate under a different one (as we shall see in Example 6). The space provided by ne can thus be used to negotiate participation frameworks by displaying both alignment and non-alignment. Most importantly, expressed alignment to a proposed participation framework constitutes one’s transient but sanctioned ‘‘membership’’ in its joint activity (being a story recipient of a storyteller, for example, or an advice-giver to an advice-seeker, or even simply being the sanctioned recipient of a turn of talk, as in Example 1). In short, what I want to argue here is that if talk between two individuals is, as Schegloff claims, ‘‘the primordial site of sociality’’ (1986:112), then the ongoing proposal, acceptance and establishment of such joint ‘‘memberships’’ between conversationalists in the project that is co-present talk may represent the most fundamental acts of social ‘‘co-membership’’, and the explicitly aligned co-members of a proposed participation framework constitute the smallest social ‘‘membership group.’’ To examine this idea in more depth, let’s consider the following two examples. In an assessment activity, assessing something jointly experienced categorizes the recipient of the first assessment as a co-experiencer. In the excerpt below, the child and the mother are building a paper origami house, and here the child is commenting on the ‘‘carpet’’ of origami that has just been completed. [Shoota: 3:00 ]

1!

C:

dekita ne

?

(5)

sutekina juutan ga nice

carpet NOM made

IP

‘Nice carpet is made ne.’ M:

un.

suteki da

yeah nice

ne

?

2!

PRED IP

‘yeah, it’s nice ne.’ 3

C:

[un. ‘yeah.’

Heritage and Raymond (2005) and Raymond and Heritage (2006) have demonstrated that in assessment sequences, offering a first assessment inevitably implies that the speaker has primary rights to evaluate the matter assessed and that the participants of assessment interactively deal with this implication using downgrades or upgrades of their own ‘‘relative epistemic rights’’ if they wish to challenge or modify this tacit claim. Accordingly, adding ne to a first assessment in Japanese conversation works as a resource to downgrade the primacy implied from its sequential position. That is, the speaker of such a ne-augmented first assessment explicitly indicates the negotiable nature of the recipient’s alignment in the proposed participation framework and underscores the importance of the stance towards that proposed framework incarnate in the next-turn response by the ne-addressed recipient. In line 1 of the data excerpt above, the co-participant’s ‘‘right to assess’’ is thus explicitly acknowledged and guaranteed. Note, too, that the speaker of the second assessment also adds ne to accomplish the same purpose, indicating that her second assessment likewise concerns alignment; in this way, she also displays her mutual affiliative stance. Relatedly, Pomerantz states: Across different situations, conversants orient to agreeing with one another as comfortable, supportive, reinforcing, perhaps as being sociable and as showing that they are like-minded. . . .Sociability, support, and solidarity often involve the participants’ agreeing or at least not overtly disagreeing with one another. (1984a:77) It is easy for us to see now that ne added in such an assessment sequence is not used to deal with a perceived or anticipated ‘problem’ of alignment (such as we have seen in our earlier examples) but rather to thematize the act of alignment itself by the participants. In so doing, conversationalists who co-participate in such explicit alignment confirmation are establishing a kind of co-membership between themselves, at least for the duration of the alignment.

E. Morita / Journal of Pragmatics 44 (2012) 298–314

307

Cook’s observation (1992) that ne indexes ‘‘affective common ground’’ may arise from such interactive acts of selfcategorization, and especially when iterated, such synergetic action reveals itself as a primary form of ‘‘solidarity building’’. As in all things interactive, however, activities such as assessment activities can also become an arena within which to negotiate or oppose the proposed co-membership of the co-knower, co-experiencer or co-assessor. Thus, it would be erroneous to conclude that ne is ‘‘a marker of solidarity building’’ (or of ‘‘femininity’’ or ‘‘politeness’’) per se. Rather, it is only through the real-time collaborative work of negotiating alignment issues that participants create, confirm, and alter the participation frameworks in which they engage with one another and by which they come to understand and eventually define one another. The next example shows how adding ne to the talk’s projected participation framework is consequential for the recipient’s alignment to the second assessment and how co-membership is negotiated throughout the activity. We will see here that the participation framework is informed by an assumed co-membership but that this assumption is subject to negotiation and that the subsequent change in the participation framework reflects a re-categorizing of the membership.4 In the excerpt below, M and H are Japanese graduate students in Los Angeles and are discussing the local food options. M has just explained to H that when she recently went to a Korean barbecue restaurant with her friends, she was the only Asian present and ended up taking care of the fire at the table and doing all the cooking for her other friends. (6)

[M&H06 ]

1

M:

iya, de

ajiajin wa watashi hitori minna

INTJ then Asian

TOP I

alone

osorechatte:,

everyone scared-ASP:TE

‘Yeah, I was the only Asian and everyone got scared,’ 2

H:

3

M:

uun ‘mmm’ kowagacchatte

waa toka tte otokonoko no

scared-ASP-ASP:TE SSW SOF 4

QT

boys

demoo atashi shikatanai kara but

5

I

ittete:

moo,

can’t.help because EMPH

koori motte-kun-no ice

hoo

ATT side go:ASP:TE

ne:" yappari,

hold:TE-come-SE IP

nevertheless

‘(the girls) got scared and went to boys saying ‘‘waa,’’ but I cannot help, so brought ice,’ (24 turns omitted) 29

M:

demo are(.) ano,(.) sooyuu minna but

that

nabe o

INTJ

de

ano,

so say everyone with INTJ

shitari toka yaitari

nabe ACC do-CONN CNJ

suru toki ni,

grill-CONN do

time at

‘But when we do hot-pot or barbecue with everyone,’ 30

H:

31 !

M:

nn. ‘mm’ ano.. ajiajin tte minna uh sa

QT

kyootsuu no

everyone common

bunka

de

ATT culture COP:TE

tto dekiru yo ne

?

32 !

Asian

SSW QT

do-can IP IP

‘uh, Asian people can do efficiently because of their shared culture yo ne.’ 33 !

H:

(1.4) soo janai, yappari. so

MOD

as.expected

‘I guess so.’ 34

M:

un,

sugoi yo [:. ano [[kokyuu no- u[un.

yeah great IP

that

timing GEN mmm

‘Yeah, they are great. The timing...yeah.’ 35

H:

[demo sa: [[ajia no- [uun. but

IP

Asia ATT

mmm

‘But. . . Asian... yeah.’ 4

For interesting observations on changing categories by conversationalists, see also Kushida (1999).

E. Morita / Journal of Pragmatics 44 (2012) 298–314

308

36

H:

tte iu QT

37

ka nan te iu

say Q

no

how QT say SE

amerikajin toka seiyoo American

38

CNJ

mazu sa, hitotsu no first IP

39

one

ryoori

tte iu-no

western cuisine QT sara o

shea

wa

sono::,

say-SE TOP INTJ suru koto tte koto jitai=

ATT dish ACC share do

NML

QT

NML

itself

=yaranai jan. anmashi. do-NEG

MOD

not.so.much

‘Rather, how can I say, American people, or in Western cuisine, it is rare or not so common to share one dish, first of all.’ 40

M:

yaranai ne: anmari:. Do-NEG

IP

not.so.much

‘They don’t do ne, not so much.’ M’s assessment in line 32 constitutes an activity of praising. Pomerantz reports that ‘‘when a speaker assesses a referent that is expectably accessible to a recipient, the initial assessment provides the relevance of the recipient’s second assessment. That relevance is particularly visible when initial assessments have a format to invite/constrain subsequence’’ (1984a:61). By adding yo in line 32, M explicitly marks that this talk must be explicitly registered by her recipient – a move that also serves to assert claims of both the story’s tellability as well as of her own tellership. (A more in-depth analysis of the role of yo in Japanese conversational interaction will be found in Morita (in preparation).) However, by also adding ne to her claim about the ‘‘shared Asian culture’’ that includes both her and H, M explicitly creates a space for H to display her alignment to the unfolding participation framework now proposed (i.e., ‘‘co-praising’’ of the shared culture’s ‘‘efficiency’’ in communal eating). Thus, although M maintains her epistemic rights by indexing her first assessment with yo by adding ne immediately afterwards, M’s initiated praise assessment now explicitly invites the recipient’s subsequent praise assessment in return. However, despite the fact that such a participation framework for the joint praising of their shared culture is being offered by M, H’s response in line 33 is delayed, and her 1.4-s pause projects a dispreferred response (Pomerantz, 1984a). In fact, H later (lines 36–39) points out a problem with the logic of M’s assessment, questioning the comparability of Asians versus Westerners and noting that Western food is usually not even served in one common dish at the table. What is interesting here is that although H’s response is not a fully aligned one of co-praising, she nonetheless offers M some token alignment with a weak agreement of M’s assessment in line 33 by treating it as an objective, but not necessarily praiseworthy, description of ‘‘Asian people.’’ Rather, H’s response is here delivered in a merely ‘‘pro forma’’ agreement format (Schegloff, 2007:69) instead of the ‘‘preferred agreement’’ format, which would consist of an upgrade or a token agreement plus an upgrade, according to Pomerantz (1984a). The grammatical form ‘‘soo janai? (it may be so)’’ also indicates that her action in line 33 is only proffering a conjecture (and not a fully aligned agreement) about the correctness of M’s observation in lines 31 and 32. Most noticeably, ne, which typically appears in the second assessment of co-praising, does not appear in H’s response, and its absence here stands in stark contradistinction to the copious ne-exchanges of Examples 4 and 5. Instead, the activity framed by ne, in which ‘‘co-praising’’ was projected by M, is re-categorized by H to merely ‘‘stating an observation’’, while the weaker epistemic stance towards M’s claim expressed by ‘‘janai?’’ (I guess, or may be) allows H to disqualify herself as a fully aligned co-praiser. Most tellingly for our purposes, the introduction of even this much displayed non-full-alignment does not go unnoticed by M. Accordingly, M’s next turn (line 34) starts with ‘un’, acknowledging H’s response in line 33. However, at this point the originally proposed participation framework for co-praising is now visibly in non-alignment, M reasserts her claim from line 34 using a different recipient design. Significantly, this time M’s upgraded assessment in line 34 is proffered as her own – and this time it does not include ne. In fact, M uses yo instead to note the epistemic rights of her claim (Morita, in preparation),5 which presents a striking difference to the shared epistemic alignment framework of ne that was proposed, and then not fully accepted, only two turns earlier.6 5 The analysis of yo requires its own full paper-length discussion, which I am currently in the midst of preparing. To briefly summarize the arguments of that forthcoming paper, by deploying yo, a speaker explicitly expresses his or her concern that the action just introduced into the talk must be properly ‘‘registered’’ by the recipient. Explicit marking of such a mundane expectation highlights the assertion of tellership on the part of the speaker, and through that, it may also imply what Heritage and Raymond (2005:19) refer to as a teller’s ‘‘epistemic rights’’. It is important to note, however, that the ‘‘epistemic rights’’ invoked by yo do not regard the relative amount of the knowledge that a speaker possesses in relation to her interlocutor but rather her own interactional rights to tellership and assessment. For an analysis of yo as a marker to claim ‘‘epistemic primacy’’, see also Hayano (2011). 6 Pomerantz (1984b) reports different ways in which speakers pursue a response. One of the ways is to ‘‘change one’s position’’. By not adding ne in line 34, M is revising her earlier epistemic stance towards the original claim from one of ‘‘shared’’ assessment to one of ‘‘unshared’’ (or at least ‘‘potentially unshared’’) assessment. But I again want to emphasize here that ne and yo are not markers of ‘‘sharedness of information’’ or of relative epistemic primacy per se. Rather, the implication of ‘unsharedness’ here derives from the contrast with M’s previous formulation of the claim, which was presented as alignable and was therefore marked by ne.

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309

Let us now examine what is being negotiated here. In the above short stretch of talk, we see two different levels of ‘‘comembership’’ being negotiated simultaneously. The first is the participation framework level (Goodwin, 1981), which is projected by the activity of praising. Here, a first praising makes a second co-praising relevant. When both participants align to this participation framework, a co-praising ‘‘membership’’ in the participation framework is established. ‘‘This multiparty arrangement, with the possibilities it creates for ongoing mutual monitoring and joint focus’’, writes Goodwin in defining the notion of a participation framework: creates an environment where other kinds of sign exchange processes, including talk, gesture, and visible stance displays can occur. Note, that as a semiotic process, this participation framework is quite different from the talk and other activities that occur within it. Its referential focus is not on the substance of what is being talked about . . . but instead it is about the alignment of the participants towards each other. (Goodwin, in preparation; see also 2007). A second level of membership being negotiated here is that of shared ancestry and identity, as the assessment of ‘‘Asians’ efficiency in collaborative cooking’’ in M’s talk in lines 1 and 3 proposes an epistemic membership category in which M is implicating both herself and H (here again, this is an example of how such in-the-moment alignment work of ne can often reasonably be interpreted as marking ‘‘sharedness of information’’ (Kamio, 1997) or invoking ‘‘common ground’’). M’s word choice of ‘‘Asian’’ in line 32 (instead of the more specific ‘‘Japanese’’) implies that both M and H know Asians other than Japanese (e.g., Korean or Chinese), and when such ‘‘common ground’’ or ‘‘shared information’’ is established by H’s display of full alignment, that then will constitute a ‘co-knowing’ membership between them. The expectation that ‘‘Asian people know about Asian people’s ability in shared cooking’’ indicates M’s categorizing H as co-member at least for the duration of the co-praising activity. This kind of transient, but checked-for and responded-to, ‘‘membership acceptance’’ in participation frameworks is a liminal phenomenon in interaction that lies between ‘‘membership’’ as an interactional co-participant in a given proposed participation framework and those larger ‘‘social’’ membership categories, such as Asian, Japanese, women, cosmopolitan, or foodie.7 Furthermore, the interactional space where the recipient of the talk has the opportunity to express the recipient’s alignment with the participation framework being proposed or perpetuated becomes salient with the addition of ne here.8 Thus, when participants could be categorized as belonging to the same membership category relevant to a given assessment activity, as is the case here, aligned participation is even more expectable (leading to the impression of ne as an ‘‘agreement eliciting device’’). The degree of this expectation’s salience in any given interaction is, of course, also determined by various other factors (e.g., the likelihood of having the same experience) and paralinguistic features (e.g., the speaker’s tone of voice). However, analysis of my data leads me to conclude that the addition of ne adds extra interactional pressure upon participants when confronted with a proposed participation framework, for ne gives such participants the opportunity to publicly acknowledge that they recognize the framework being proposed and that they have willingly chosen to align to and participate in that framework. Thus, ‘‘alignment’’ is not only what people orient to and display in interaction but is also something that can be explicitly thematized as a relevant concern at any given interactional moment. We can now see why ne – which explicitly thematizes the state of alignment between two participants at any given moment – could be (and often is) associated with ‘‘solidarity building’’ or ‘‘rapport talk’’. We can also see that overtly putting someone in a position to acknowledge such concerns, especially if done too frequently, could lead to giving the impression of being ‘‘coercing’’, ‘‘too intrusive’’ or ‘‘overly friendly’’, all of which have also been claimed as ‘‘characteristics’’ of ne. By understanding this micro-membership of transiently (but consequentially) aligned co-participation (or ‘‘small-m membership category’’) as a fluid category, we can now begin to discern the mechanism whereby the local negotiation of interactional roles in participation frameworks can be the raw material upon which speakers and hearers negotiate their own and each other’s ‘‘big-M membership categories’’ in interaction.9 We can see here too how ne works to thematize and establish ‘‘alignment’’ across multiple levels simultaneously, and unsurprisingly, each level can be the ongoing subject of negotiation. In the preceding section, we have seen that building participation frameworks involves participants’ construction of ‘‘comembership’’ within the ongoing activity and that assessment sequences are important sites for validating or challenging ‘‘membership’’ statuses (e.g., co-experiencer, member of knowing a certain issue, believer of a theory). On such occasions, the 7 Raymond and Heritage have also demonstrated how participants design their turns in assessment sequences in ways that allow them to make claims to epistemic primacy and have examined the role of such claims in helping to constitute participants’ identities. They claim that ‘‘through repetition and reproduction, [such claims to epistemic primacy] come to be sustained as an enduring feature of a person’’ (2006:700). Raymond and Heritage’s analysis of how turn designs ‘‘come to be heard’’ as personality characteristics is very similar to the kind of analysis that I am arguing for in this paper. 8 The particle yo here also predisposes the acceptance by the recipient (Morita, in preparation). 9 It should be noted that my use of the terms ‘‘small-m’’ membership category and ‘‘big-M’’ membership category respectively refer to (1) the categories relevant to the ever-shifting nature of participation framework pair-positions from moment to moment (e.g., questioner/answerer; storyteller/story hearer) as opposed to (2) larger ‘cultural’ membership categories, such as male/female, young person/old person, Asian/non-Asian, etc. This distinction between ‘‘small-m’’ and ‘‘big-M’’ categories only coincidentally recalls Sacks’ purely orthographic decision in his landmark 1972 paper on membership category devices (MCD’s) to use a capital M when referring to the ‘‘Members’’ of a society who use MCD’s and a lower-case ‘‘m’’ when referring to the categories that themselves are ‘‘members’’ of an MCD collection. I thank the anonymous reviewer who alerted me to the potential confusion inherent in my use of these terms.

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E. Morita / Journal of Pragmatics 44 (2012) 298–314

successful alignment of a participation framework is also the successful establishment of a normative co-membership. Thus, conversationalists’ stance taking of alignment and disalignment to proposed participation frameworks in talk does more than just enable them to deal successfully with the ongoing sequence organization (though it surely does that as well); it also serves to display how participants of talk-in-interaction actively categorize themselves moment by moment within the realm of their equally moment-by-moment co-constructed social worlds. As I will now discuss below, such stance taking towards participation frameworks is thus deeply implicated in the display and negotiation of social identity. 6. How ne is connected to ideology-laden interpretations In the previous section, we saw how ne’s micro-level function can be connected to the more macro-level formation of membership in co-negotiating the participation framework. Now we will consider its link to an even higher-level social order that is informed by language ideology. Let us return to the posting on a web-discussion forum I included at the beginning of the paper to see if we can reconcile the evidence that it presents that a speaker’s use of ne can lead to impressionistic interpretations about that speaker’s identity within existing social roles with what we have learned here about how participants use ne as a resource to negotiate their moment-to-moment alignment issues during the course of a talk. Recall that in our original example, a 30-year-old woman was complaining about her boyfriend’s use of ne phrases such as ‘‘kyoo wa tanoshikatta ne (we had a good time, didn’t we)?’’ If we look at this assessment statement objectively, however, the gender of its speaker is not inferable solely from the utterance alone. Indeed, even if one knows that this was written by a man, most native Japanese speakers may not feel this formulation to be particularly ‘‘feminine’’. Yet the author of this posting thinks that the use of ne is not appropriate for a 30-year-old man and that it sounds like ‘‘a young girl’s talk’’.10 How can the use of ne be thought to be indexing gender and age here but not elsewhere, such as in our earlier examples? And how is such an association only possible in some cases and not in others? Many studies that associate ne with gendered language (e.g., Mizumoto, 2006; Ogawa, 2006) have not analyzed the mechanics of naturally occurring interaction data to explore these questions. Indeed, the avoidance of employing CA methodology to come to terms with such phenomena has led to the proposal of a number of conflicting explanations about what ne does. Let us try to clarify this issue by examining this posting in light of what we have learned about ne thus far. First, although the data reported is a written message, we can still examine the participation framework being proposed by this message. The message from the author’s self-described ‘‘boyfriend’’ – ‘‘kyoo wa tanoshikatta ne (we had a good time today, didn’t we?)’’ – would almost certainly be a message that was sent to her after the two had gone out on a date or had at least spent some time together. As in conversational interactions, a speaker (here, writer) who makes an assessment of the date ‘‘kyoo wa tanoshikatta’’ and then adds ne to that assessment is explicitly creating a space for the recipient to display his stance towards the projected participation framework of ‘‘co-enjoyers of the date’’. As we have seen, it is also a technique for the thematization of ‘alignment’ itself, for when ne is attached to such a first assessment sequence, it draws special attention to the participation framework for the purpose of alignment. This may be interpreted as a display of solicitude (and again, on the interactional rather than the psychological level, it surely is). As we have seen above, when the assessment claim about something jointly experienced has been articulated, a second assessment claim on the part of the recipient is particularly relevant next. Yet while such practices can be instrumental in establishing both participant membership as co-experiencers and ‘‘solidarity building,’’ the continual focus on the validation of ‘alignment’ may come to be heard as either ‘‘needy’’ or perhaps even ‘‘coercive.’’ When such behavior is repeatedly and consistently observed for particular members of a social category, the pattern eventually comes to be associated with that membership category.11 When such behavior is checked against the language ideology held by the recipients, such repeated use of ne may then be evaluated and perceived positively or negatively. According to the author of this web posting, such behavior is typical of ‘‘young girls’’. Note that her statement ‘‘he uses it regularly’’ is already an evaluative term based on longitudinal observation and is not describing only one particular use of ne in situ. What the author is displaying here, then, are some of the root categories of her own particularly constructed language ideology. Such ideologies are of course not formed in a vacuum, and meta-linguistic discourse about the use of ne, such as the author’s comments above, suggest that there exist sociolinguistic conventions in her particular speech community that determine the ‘‘appropriate’’ amount and type of ‘explicit alignment solicitation’ acceptable for various social identities (e.g., young and old, male and female, social superior and subordinate). Thus, a higher order of language ideology is operationalized in the interpretation of lower-level (turn- and discourse-level) events.

10 In this instance, however, we have no way of knowing whether the ne which appears katakanized in the poster’s report was, indeed, katakanized in the boyfriend’s original message (and that it may be the katakanization of ne (and not ne itself) that the poster is objecting to, as has been suggested by a reviewer of this paper) or whether the katakanized ne here is the poster’s own orthography. Moreover, in either case, katakanizing certain words in a passage is often used merely as a way of ‘‘highlighting’’ them for special attention by the reader, similar to how writers of English might use italics. However, because no explicit reference to katakana – nor to any Japanese interactional particles other than ne – appear in the data, we will operate on the assumption that it is indeed the ‘‘overuse’’ of ne, and not the use of katakana here, that the poster is objecting to and dismissing as ‘‘unmanly.’’ 11 Kataoka (1995) reports that ne, together with other so-called sentence final particles, ‘‘fills every nook and cranny of the letters and cards written by young Japanese women’’ (1995:430).

[(Fig._1)TD$IG]

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Fig. 1. Derived implication for the assessment of ‘‘Kyoo tanoshikatta (we had a good time today)’’ with and without ne.

Let us then seek a possible derivational interpretation of how the use of genderless, age-neutral ne leads to the violation of what is socially ‘‘expected behavior of a grown-up man’’, according to this author’s language ideology. Fig. 1 is a rough outline of one such possible derivation. Working within the parameters of this flow chart (Fig. 1) of possible interpretations, had the ‘‘boyfriend’’ in question proffered his first assessment without ne (as the author ‘‘wishes’’ he would do), a second assessment would still be relevant next but somewhat less so, as the emphasis on alignment to the participation framework would not be overtly indicated. Compared with the same assessment with ne, such a formulation could be heard as expressing less reliance on the recipient, as ne can also be effectively used as a ‘tag question’ of the kind that Heritage (2002:205) has shown ‘‘downgrades [the] epistemic authority’’ of the speaker’s utterance. A ne-less ‘‘we had a good time today’’ may make this same assessment heard more as an ‘‘opinion’’ – which, in turn, implies an ‘‘independent stance’’ in proffering this assessment – rather than an ‘‘invitation to co-praising’’. Such ‘‘independent’’ behavior could, in turn, be interpreted as the kind of ‘‘autonomous social action’’ deemed appropriate for (or at least stereotypical of) a ‘‘typical grown-up male’s’’ behavior in the author’s language ideology. Such an account, of course, is not meant to be a ‘‘definitive’’ account of ‘‘how ne is always interpreted’’ nor even of the underlying psychology of the ne-disliking author herself. However, it at least offers one reasonable theoretical path of ever higher-level interpretation consistent with the author’s claim that her boyfriend’s use of ne in the examples makes him ‘‘sound like a young girl’’ to her and why she ‘‘wishes that he wouldn’t use it’’. Again, it is important to note that this chart by no means intends to show a fixed path of derivable interpretations but only one set of twinned logically possible implications that can account for the phenomenon under examination. More central to my overall argument is the fact that the arrows move from bottom to top. In other words, I have attempted to show throughout this paper that it is not a person’s inclusion within some pre-given gendered membership category (or any other higher-order social category) that determines a speaker’s use of ne, though the use of ne, through its association with the negotiation of interpersonal alignment, may come to be heard as ‘‘appropriate’’ for certain socially constructed ‘‘identities’’ and ‘‘types.’’ The use of ne is perceived negatively by this author, but as we have seen previously, it just as often carries positive associations. Yet, even where the explicit display of alignment facilitates impressions of ‘‘sharedness of experience’’ or ‘‘common ground’’, such implied meaning is not an inherent property of ne itself, as such a meaning would not apply to ne when attached to other actions, such as apology. Instead we see that the fundamental interactive alignment function of ne gives rise to a number of equally reasonable impressions as to its ‘‘meaning’’, depending precisely upon how such proposed alignment activity is perceived at the moment of its instantiation as indicated in Fig. 2. As we have seen, in assessment activities, recipients of a ne-marked assessment are being invited to locate themselves within a certain kind of co-membership in the turn that immediately follows and may then accept or reject that co-membership in response. When accepted, such co-membership, however transient, may become a tool for solidarity building, as is seen in the origami carpet example. Yet a recipient who does not wish to fully align with such a co-membership invitation (as is the case in the ‘‘Asian’’ example) and who may even consider the very invitation to alignment at that point presumptuous or coercive likewise has the sanctioned opportunity in the immediately following turn to deny, challenge and/or negotiate the co-memberships of which she will be a part. In all cases, then, ne’s marking of alignment as a relevant issue amplifies the aspect of participants as social actors. And while the author of the Hatsugen Komachi post may impute over-reliance on the recipient as a consequence of ne-marked talk, such ne-marking may also be understood in a more positive light, as it could imply that the ne speaker is highlighting the fact that the proffered ongoing action is not being assumed unilaterally and is thus explicitly showing due consideration to

[(Fig._2)TD$IG]

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Fig. 2. Derivation of different impressionistic interpretations of ne.

his or her interlocutor. In short, it is ne’s underlying association with the function of interactive alignment that leads to the impressionistic hearings of ne as ‘‘polite’’, ‘‘needy’’, ‘‘coercive’’ and ‘‘solidarity building’’ – all of which share as their common root the concept of alignment. Fig. 2 sketches out the general derivation path by which the interactive particle ne comes to be associated with ever higher-level interpretative meanings. 7. Conclusion A few notable exceptions notwithstanding, traditional Japanese linguistics has been slow to incorporate findings about real-time conversational practice that have been discovered in the field of Conversation Analysis (CA), while much CA work makes little attempt to incorporate the findings of traditional linguists who examine languages other than English. Acknowledging the important work being accomplished in both of these fields, I have attempted here to show how both fields’ seemingly incongruous understandings of the Japanese interactional particle ne can be simultaneously correct. As one moves from the empirical CA evidence of how actual speakers have designed actual turns – and how these turns (and the elements therein) are responded to by interlocutors – and proceeds to link such evidence with more psychological and ‘‘impression’’-based hearings of ne, one can see that the common thread that joins the two is the phenomenon of interpersonal alignment. The data reviewed here clearly reveal that ne works as a device to explicitly draw attention to the ongoing participation framework for the purposes of its alignment or realignment. Yet, while such turn-level alignment work has immediate consequences for the ensuing turn-taking organization of the talk, speakers’ very thematization of current ‘alignment’ issues per se can quite easily be heard as a kind of interpersonal stance taking, such as politeness, solicitousness, and coerciveness. Thus, the resulting semiotics of ‘‘alignment’’ that become indexed by such uses of ne give rise to various impressionistic and even ‘ideological’ interpretations among conversationalists (such as the notion that certain levels of solicitousness are typical of ‘‘young girl’s speech’’). Most importantly, in attempting to move from studying the function of alignment in talk to showing how such functional activities give rise to hearings of the concept of alignment in talk, I have hoped to show the deep interconnection between social action and the social mind. Appendix A 1. Abbreviations used in the interlinear gloss ACC

accusative

INTJ

interjection

POL

polite form

ASP

aspect

IP

interactional particle

Q

question

ATT

attributive

MOD

modal auxiliary

QT

quotative particle

CNJ

conjunctive

NEG

negative

SE

sentence extender

CONN

connective

NML

nominalizer

SOF

softening word

DAT

dative

NOM

nominative

SSW

sound-symbolic word

EMPH

emphasis marker

PAST

past

TE

conjunctive form

GEN

genitive

PRED

predicate

TOP

topic marker

VOL

volitional

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313

2. Transcription conventions [

the point where overlapping talk starts

=

no interval between adjacent utterances

::

lengthened syllable

?

rising intonation, not necessarily a question

?

rising intonation stronger than a comma but weaker than a question marker

.

falling intonation

,

continuing intonation

!

animated tone, not necessarily an exclamation

-

a cut-off or self-interruption

()

unintelligible stretch

(.)

short pause of approximately 0.2 s

(0.0)

length of silence in tenths of a second

(( ))

transcriber’s description of events

.hh

audible in-breath

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Web reference Hatsugen Komachi. Posted on 2009 March. In Yomiuri Online. http://komachi.yomiuri.co.jp/t/2009/0329/232290.htm?g=01&from=yol. Dr. Emi Morita received her Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2003. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Japanese Studies at National University of Singapore. Her research interests are in Japanese sociolinguistics and interactional linguistics.