Paper Title

A cross-linguistic Analysis of Demonstratives in Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin as Resources for Dealing with Word-formulation Trouble in Conversation

Author's Name, E-mail Address and Institution

Makoto Hayashi, mhayashi@uiuc.edu, University of Illinois

Abstract

Word-formulating trouble is one of the most common problems that speakers face (native or nonnative) during ongoing verbal interaction, and different languages make available to their speakers different strategies to deal with it. For example, Japanese provides its speakers with distal demonstratives (are, asoko, etc.) as a resource to hold the place for a temporarily unavailable word during the course of an utterance (Kitano 1999; Hayashi 2003). Using the methodology of Conversation Analysis, the present study shows that the use of demonstratives as a resource to deal with word-formulating trouble is not limited to Japanese, but is cross-linguistically observed. Focusing on Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin, I first show that, in all these languages, demonstratives are used as (1) hesitation markers (comparable to ano(o) in Japanese) and (2) placeholders (comparable to are in Japanese). I then demonstrate the following cross-linguistic differences. While only distal demonstratives are used for placeholders in Japanese, Korean speakers use both distal (ce) and medial (ku) forms, and Mandarin speakers use distal (na) and proximal (zhe) forms. Further, Korean medial forms and Mandarin distal forms are used when the speaker assumes that the hearer has shared knowledge about the referent being searched for, whereas Korean distal forms and Mandarin proximal forms are used when the speaker does not have such an assumption. Such a distinction is not observed in Japanese speakers' usage of distal demonstratives as placeholders. Explicating these cross-linguistic similarities and differences can be significant for Japanese language pedagogy, because it makes us aware of potential L1 transfer in the use of demonstratives by Korean- and Mandarin-speaking learners during word- formulating trouble in Japanese. As an implication of the study, I argue for the need to teach these 'compensatory strategies' to overcome difficulties in language production in conversation for the development of learners? communicative skills.
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