Makoto Hayashi

Universals and cultural variation in turn-taking in conversation

Informal verbal interaction is the core matrix for human social life. A mechanism for coordinating this basic mode of interaction is a system of turn-taking that regulates who is to speak and when. Yet relatively little is known about how this system varies across cultures. The anthropological literature reports significant cultural differences in the timing of turn-taking in ordinary conversation. We test these claims and show that in fact there are striking universals in the underlying pattern of response latency in conversation. Using a worldwide sample of 10 languages drawn from traditional indigenous communities to major world languages, we show that all of the languages tested provide clear evidence for a general avoidance of overlapping talk and a minimization of silence between conversational turns. In addition, all of the languages show the same factors explaining within-language variation in speed of response. We do, however, find differences across the languages in the average gap between turns, within a range of 250 ms from the cross-language mean. We believe that a natural sensitivity to these tempo differences leads to a subjective perception of dramatic or even fundamental differences as offered in ethnographic reports of conversational style. Our empirical evidence suggests robust human universals in this domain, where local variations are quantitative only, pointing to a single shared infrastructure for language use with likely ethological foundations.

Transformative answers: One way to resist a question's constraints

A number of Conversation Analytic studies have documented that question recipients have a variety of ways to push against the constraints that questions impose on them. This article explores the concept of transformative answers – answers through which question recipients retroactively adjust the question posed to them. Two main sorts of adjustments are discussed: question term transformations and question agenda transformations. It is shown that the operations through which interactants implement term transformations are different from the operations through which they implement agenda transformations. Moreover, term-transforming answers resist only the question’s design, while agenda-transforming answers effectively resist both design and agenda, thus implying that agenda-transforming answers resist more strongly than design-transforming answers. The implications of these different sorts of transformations for alignment and affiliation are then explored. *

Joint utterance construction in Japanese conversation

This book focuses on how participants in Japanese conversation negotiate and achieve joint courses of action within a single turn at talk. Using the methodology of Conversation Analysis as a central framework, this book describes in detail the structures and procedures used by Japanese speakers to jointly produce a coherent grammatical unit-in-progress, and explores the range of social actions that speakers accomplish by employing that practice. This study is part of a larger project intended to investigate how humans achieve intricate coordination of their behavior with that of co-participants in everyday social encounters and how language plays a constitutive part in making such micro-level social coordination possible. Through a close examination of joint utterance construction in Japanese, this book contributes to a growing body of research into the mutual influence between the grammatical organization of language and the organization of situated human conduct in social interaction.

Language and the Body as Resources for Collaborative Action: A Study of Word Searches in Japanese Conversation

This study explores a range of vocal and visual practices deployed by Japanese speakers during the course of a word search in naturally occurring conversation, and shows how such embodied practices provide publicly available resources for recipients to organize their relevant participation in the ongoing word search. In particular, this study addresses the following three main issues: (a) how speakers mobilize their gaze to invite or not invite recipients coparticipation; (b) how distal demonstrative pronouns (e.g., are that one, asoko that place) and/or gestures are deployed to index a particular domain of words to which the searched-for item belongs; (c) how recipients utilize the projective resources made available through the speakers vocal and visual conduct to achieve a collaborative solution of the ongoing search.

Conversational Repair and Human Understanding

Humans are imperfect, and problems of speaking, hearing and understanding are pervasive in ordinary interaction. This book examines the way we “repair” and correct such problems as they arise in conversation and other forms of human interaction. The first book-length study of this topic, it brings together a team of scholars from the fields of anthropology, communication, linguistics and sociology to explore how speakers address problems in their own talk and that of others, and how the practices of repair are interwoven with non-verbal aspects of communication such as gaze and gesture, across a variety of languages. Specific chapters highlight intersections between repair and epistemics, repair and turn construction, and repair and action formation. Aimed at researchers and students in sociolinguistics, speech communication, conversation analysis and the broader human and social sciences to which they contribute – anthropology, linguistics, psychology and sociology – this book provides a state-of-the-art review of conversational repair, while charting new directions for future study.

Discourse within a sentence: An exploration of postpositions in Japanese as an interactional resource

This study explores a phenomenon in Japanese conversation that might be regarded as “discourse-within-a-sentence,” or interpolating a sequence of talk during ongoing sentence construction. It explicates the way in which Japanese speakers use postpositional particles as a resource to incorporate an element in a parenthetical sequence into the syntax of a sentence-in-progress. It is shown that the usability of postpositions for achieving discourse-within-a-sentence comes from the situated workings of postpositions used in a wider range of interactional contexts. Through a detailed examination of relevant instances from transcribed Japanese conversations, this study addresses such issues as (i) “sentences” in interaction as both a resource for, and an outcome of, intricate interactional work; (ii) postpositions as resources for retroactive transformations of turn-shapes in Japanese; and (iii) the relationship between typological features of the grammar of a language and forms of interactional practices. I wish to thank the following people for valuable comments at various stages in the development of this article: William Bright, Cecilia Ford, Barbara Fox, Noriko Fujii, Charles Goodwin, Jane Hill, Junko Mori, Tsuyoshi Ono, Jerome Packard, Hiroko Tanaka, and Sandra Thompson. Remaining shortcomings are my responsibility.

Biogenesis of protein bodies by budding from vacuoles in developing pumpkin cotyledons

SummaryVacuoles were isolated from pumpkin cotyledons at three developmental stages and judged to be pure by light microscopic inspection and marker enzyme assays. The time sequence of structural changes of vacuoles were examined by light microscopic inspection in parallel with their stainability with neutral red. Vacuoles isolated from the early stage of cotyledon development were heterogeneous in size (Ø=2–10 Μm) but stained uniformly with the dye. In contrast, vacuoles isolated from the middle stage were much larger (Ø=5–15 Μm), and there exist one to three cores, unstainable with neutral red, within a single vacuole. Electron microscopic observation confirms that vacuoles contain a few protein cores in cotyledon cells at the middle stage. Characteristically at this stage, it was observable that some large cores (Ø=4Μm) were budding from vacuoles. At the late stage, size of vacuoles becomes much smaller (Ø=6Μm), nearly equal to that of the protein bodies in dry seeds. Importantly, at this stage most of the volume of each vacuole was occupied by a single core, and only a small matrix space was stainable with neutral red. Suborganellar fractionation indicates that the vacuolar cores were identical to the crystalloids deposited in the protein bodies in dry seeds. Overall results strongly provide the evidence that one crystalloid buds from the vacuole during the later stage of seed maturation, giving rise to a protein body.

Conversational Repair and Human Understanding: Conversational repair and human understanding: an introduction

Any serious effort to contend with the real time production and understanding of human actions in everyday interaction can scarcely avoid noting that they are characterized by the routine occurrence of troubles, “hitches,” misunderstandings, “errors,” and other infelicities. Indeed, these phenomena – and participants’ efforts to contend with them – are so ubiquitous that very few approaches within the human and social sciences have avoided commenting on, or contending with them, in some way. In many approaches within the social sciences, researchers looked past these phenomena altogether, treating them as epiphenomenal to the proper object of study (however that is defined) or as matters to be reduced, remedied, or otherwise overcome. More recently approaches from various disciplines have recognized their import in different ways, thereby raising the more nettlesome issue of just what is to be done with them or what can be done with them. Here, approaches vary considerably: some have simply incorporated these phenomena into the larger domain of human conduct being investigated (whether it is the psyche in psychology, ritual and culture in anthropology, or social structure in sociology), conflating a range of matters that are more profitably treated as distinct from one another. In many such cases, however, scholars interested in learning about the mind, self, language, society, and culture have treated these phenomena as special – as even more informative than other types of conduct. For these approaches the ubiquity of such troubles (and their management) makes them especially attractive since their occurrence in the stream of conduct impacts on virtually every aspect of it. The perception that such troubles are special derives from a belief that they entail (or reveal) an authenticity obscured by more “practiced” behavior, or that they offer a window into the mind, or the depths of personhood, identity, and social relations, otherwise obscured by socialization, experience, or politeness. In these respects we might say that such approaches “exploit” such troubles insofar as they are not interested in them as such, but for how the apparently “unpracticed” character of such hitches, or the apparently revealing character of errors and the like, has

SMALL ORGAN SIZE 1 and SMALL ORGAN SIZE 2/DWARF AND LOW-TILLERING Form a Complex to Integrate Auxin and Brassinosteroid Signaling in Rice

Although auxin and brassinosteroid (BR) synergistically control various plant responses, the molecular mechanism underlying the auxin-BR crosstalk is not well understood. We previously identified SMOS1, an auxin-regulated APETALA2-type transcription factor, as the causal gene of the small organ size 1 (smos1) mutant that is characterized by a decreased final size of various organs in rice. In this study, we identified another smos mutant, smos2, which shows the phenotype indistinguishable from smos1. SMOS2 was identical to the previously reported DWARF AND LOW-TILLERING (DLT), which encodes a GRAS protein involved in BR signaling. SMOS1 and SMOS2/DLT physically interact to cooperatively enhance transcriptional transactivation activity in yeast and in rice nuclei. Consistently, the expression of OsPHI-1, a direct target of SMOS1, is upregulated only when SMOS1 and SMOS2/DLT proteins are both present in rice cells. Taken together, our results suggest that SMOS1 and SMOS2/DLT form a keystone complex on auxin-BR signaling crosstalk in rice.

Responding With Resistance to Wh-Questions in Japanese Talk-in-Interaction

Respondents to questions have various ways to display their stance toward the question addressed to them. This article examines the practice of deploying the negative response token iya in turn-initial position in response to wh-questions in Japanese talk-in-interaction. We show that iya-prefacing serves as an alert to the questioner that the respondent finds some aspect of the preceding question problematic. Our findings contribute to a growing body of conversation analytic research on various turn-constructional practices that are used to problematize, resist, or sidestep the constraints imposed by preceding questions across different settings and in different languages.