Bonding Through Context: Language and Interactional Alignment in Japanese Situated Discourse

✍ Scribed by Risako Ide; Kaori Hata

• Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
• Year: 2020
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 301
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This book examines the linguistic and interactional mechanisms through which people bond or feel bonded with one another by analyzing situated discourse in Japanese contexts. The term "bonding" points to the sense of co-presence, belonging, and alignment with others as well as with the space of interaction. We analyze bonding as established, not only through the usage of language as a foregrounded code, but also through multi-layered contexts shared on the interactional, corporeal, and socio-cultural levels. The volume comprises twelve chapters examining the processes of bonding (and un-bonding) using situated discourse taken from rich ethnographic data including police suspect interrogations, Skype-mediated family conversations, theatrical rehearsals, storytelling, business email correspondence and advertisements. While the book focuses on processes of bonding in Japanese discourse, the concept of bonding can be applied universally in analyzing the co-creation of semiotic, pragmatic, and communal space in situated discourse.

✦ Table of Contents

Table of contents
Introduction - Bonding through context
Section I Bonding and stance-taking in creating relationships
Chapter 1 Shifting bonds in suspect interrogations - A focus on person-reference and modality
Chapter 2 Reported thought, narrative positioning, and emotional expression in Japanese public speaking narratives
Chapter 3 The discursive construction of husband and wife bonding - Analyzing benefactives in childrearing narratives
Section II The tactics and haggling of bonding/un-bonding
Chapter 4 Bonded but un-bonded - An ethnographic account of discordance in social relations
Chapter 5 Social consequences of common ground in the act of bonding - A sociocognitive analysis of intercultural encounters
Chapter 6 Confronting the EU referendum as immigrants - How ‘bonding/un-bonding’ works in narratives of Japanese women living in the UK
Section III Bonding through embodied practices
Chapter 7 Familial bonding - The establishment of co-presence in webcam-mediated interactions
Chapter 8 Micro-bonding moments - Laughter in the joint construction of mutual affiliation in initial-encounter interactions by first and second language speakers of Japanese
Chapter 9 Creating interactional bonds during theatrical rehearsals - An interactional approach of the documentary method of interpretation
Section IV Performing bonding through indexicality and intertextuality
Chapter 10 Getting to the point - Indexical reference in English and Japanese email discourse
Chapter 11 Playful naming in playful framing - The intertextual emergence of neologism
Chapter 12 Intertextuality in Japanese advertising - The semiotics of shared narrative
List of contributors
Author Index
Subject Index