| In the field of linguistics, discourse analysts examine the use of language in conversational settings. They view grammatical features as manifestations of the state of mind of a speaker in relation to the various physical and contextual environments in which s/he is situated, including the speaker's relationship to other communication participant(s). In the field of psycholinguistics, many studies have investigated interactional phenomena in conversation data and compared conversations involving different types of interlocutor relationships, namely those between familiars (i.e. friends, couples) and those between strangers. These studies have identified differences between the two types of conversations, such as topic choice and management by the participants, as well as the strategies they use to deal with dissimilarities. Few of these studies, however, have addressed the interaction between differences in interlocutor relationships and the operation of certain grammatical phenomena observed in language use.; The goal of this study, therefore, is to explore how different interpersonal relationships interact with two linguistic phenomena, Preferred Argument Structure (PAS) and Repair, in Japanese conversations. The data in the present study consist of 10 conversations between friends and 10 conversations between strangers for comparative analysis. Examining how the linguistic phenomena of Preferred Argument Structure and Repair operate across conversations involving different interlocutor relationships, this study investigates and demonstrates how the interlocutor's conversational management, which results from his/her assessment of the degree of shared information between the interlocutors, interacts with his/her language use. We find that communicative goal(s) necessitated by a particular relationship between speakers affects the use/choice of certain clause types, types of reference used in the clause, etc., thus influencing the patterning of argument structure. Specifically, we find that elaborative, a listener-oriented repair, is used more frequently in the strangers' conversations. Conversely, emphatic, an affect-oriented repair, is observed more frequently in the friends' conversations. This study provides evidence for an interaction between the interlocutor's awareness of his/her relationship to the other conversation participant(s), and the syntactic, pragmatic and interactional aspects of his/her utterance productions, specifically involving certain aspects of PAS and Repair. |
