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This volume provides a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of the contribution of multiparty intergenerational talk in a variety of cultures to the development of children’s communicative capacities. The book focuses on the complexity of the cultural and interactional contexts in which pragmatic learning occurs and re-examines certain assumptions implicit in research on language socialization to date, such as primacy of dyadic interactions in the early ages and the presupposition of a monolingual social matrix.One of the aims of the book is to demonstrate the degree of cultural diversity in paths of pragmatic development. Individual chapters present empirically grounded analyses of talk with children of all ages, in different participation structures and in a variety of cultures. In pursuing this theme the volume is meant to further enrich cross-cultural perspectives on language socialization by providing in each of its chapters an empirically grounded analysis of the development of one specific dimension of discursive skill.The discourse dimensions represented in the volume include narratives, explanations, the language of control in intergenerational and intragenerational talk, the language of humour and affect, and bilingual conversations. The volume offers a rich spectrum of cultural variety in pragmatic development including studies of American, Greek, Japanese, Mayan, Norwegian and Swedish children and families.

Globalization has many faces. One of them is the transformation of language regimes. This book provides an in-depth account of how two second-tier languages, Japanese and German, are affected by this process. In the international arena, they no longer com

The oldest written stage of the Japanese language forms the subject of John Bentley’s important volume. The underlying texts (also presented here) are those of the religious liturgies (norito) and imperial edicts (A.D. 685). Part one deals with the liturgies, the writing system, texts, and phonology and the dating problem. The main chapters of the book are a description of nominals, verbs, verbal suffixes, auxiliary verbs, particles, and conjunctions. A chapter on the lexicon, detailing many hapax legomena and interesting words, makes this into a major reference work on early Japanese.

In this study, Tomiko Narahara offers a multi-disciplinary description of the Japanese copula, revealing it to be at the interface of morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Most striking is her discovery of the copula’s function to express the speaker’s knowledge or ignorance about the proposition of the sentence. She provides a new morphological feature analysis to derive this modal function and further proposes a series of unified accounts for a wide range of discourse phenomena.

An examination of the changing linguistic and cultural identities of bilingual students through the narratives of four Japanese returnees (kikokushijo) as they spent their adolescent years in North America and then returned to Japan to attend university. As adolescents, these students were polarized toward one language and culture over the other, but through a period of difficult readjustment in Japan they became increasingly more sophisticated in negotiating their identities and more appreciative of their hybrid selves. Yasuko Kanno analyses how educational institutions both in their host and home countries, societal recognition or devaluation of bilingualism, and the students’ own maturation contributed to shaping and transforming their identities over time. Using narrative inquiry and communities of practice as a theoretical framework, she argues that it is possible for bilingual individuals to learn to strike a balance between two languages and cultures.The work: is a longitudinal study of bilingual and bicultural identities – unlike most studies of bilingual learners, it follows the same bilingual youths from adolescence to young adulthood; documents student perspectives – redressing the neglect of student voice in much educational research, and offering educators an understanding of what the experience of learning English and becoming bilingual and bicultural looks like from the students’ point of view; and contributes to the study of language, culture and identity by demonstrating that for bilingual individuals, identity is not a simple choice of one language and culture but an ongoing balancing act of multiple languages and cultures. The work should be of interest to researchers, educators, and graduate students who are concerned with the education and personal growth of bilingual learners, and should also be useful as a text for courses in ESL/bilingual education, TESOL, applied linguistics, and multicultural education.