Japanese Speech Style Shift Symposium, March 7-10, 2002, Tucson, AZ

University Of Arizona, Tucson AZ

Investigators

Abstract

The Japanese Speech Style Shift Symposium will bring together approximately 20 leading scholars from linguistics, sociology, and anthropology who are doing groundbreaking work on in style 'shifting' in naturally occurring interactions in Japanese. The participants, who come from a variety of leading institutions in the United States and abroad, are a combination of prominent researchers in this area and younger scholars who are likely to have a major impact on this rapidly-growing field in the near future. The participants will present papers which have been pre-circulated. This will allow for a relatively lengthy and detailed discussion of each paper. There will also be a workshop devoted to examining and discussing a pre-circulated set of data. Specific goals for the symposium are 1) to determine what varieties of language tend to be used for style shifting and how pervasive the phenomenon of style shifting is, 2) to identify reasons for speech style shifts, 3) to improve our awareness of what the various disciplines represented at the symposium have to offer the study of style shifting, 4) to explore the implications speech style shifts have for our understanding of the nature of grammar, interaction, and social organization, and 5) to seek the implications our resulting understanding of style shifting has for the learning and teaching of the Japanese language. The results of the symposium will be published as an edited volume.