Abstract:

We are pleased to have this opportunity of presenting a collection of studies of the use of East Asian languages (principally Chinese/Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean) in naturally occurring interactions in ordinary conversation and institutional settings. This is the second of two volumes of East Asian Pragmatics (2.2 and 3.1) which, we hope will bring to a wider linguistics/pragmatics audience an appreciation of the breadth and vitality of research being conducted from a conversation analytic (CA) perspective – and through these studies, readers who are unfamiliar with CA will obtain a taste of what CA has to offer. As in the previous issue, we solicited these contributions from scholars we knew who are doing important and novel work on interactions in their respective languages, using CA to address significant topics and issues in pragmatics. We would welcome the opportunity to showcase more of the research being done in this area, but we hope these two issues together will give a glimpse of the wealth of CA research being done in the field of East Asian languages.

Author: Paul Drew, Elizabeth Holt, Hiroko Tanaka