A significant gap exists in spoken language that has not been addressed by linguistics, speech science, or conversation studies. This study highlights this aspect by examining nine phenomena in modern Japanese. Furthermore, through the author’s contemporary native language research on these phenomena, I have analyzed four assumptions regarded as self-evident in current linguistics. These assumptions are: the transmissive view of communication (i.e., the idea that communication is a mutual transmission of information), sententialism (i.e., the idea that discourse is made up of sentences), the displaced view of language (i.e., the idea that language is essentially separated from the situation where it is uttered), and the carved-out symbol view (i.e., the idea that symbols are independent in both meaning and phonological form). We contend that, in order to build a foundation for willing researchers interested in speech and conversation into the void, linguists should consciously examine whether these assumptions are unjustified and hindering research. If so, they should be promptly removed.

This paper investigates the pluractional nominal reduplicative (PNR) construction in Turkish, where nominal reduplication is employed for expressing a plurality of events involving a repetition in participants, time, or space. This study characterizes the construction in question as a pluractional construction and identifies two types of PNR constructions: participant-oriented and event-oriented. In terms of function, the participant-oriented PNR construction is employed to distribute events across different participants, while the event-oriented PNR construction is used to distribute events over time and space. From a morphosyntactic perspective, the former can be analyzed as a depictive construction, whereas the latter can be analyzed as an adverbial construction. Furthermore, this study compares the PNR construction with other pluractional constructions in Turkish, highlighting its multifunctional nature in contrast to the specialized pluractionality expressed by other constructions.

Many studies have shown that most of the western Japanese dialects share cognate aspectual markers, collectively called “tor(u).” The Iizuka dialect spoken in Iizuka City, however, has two types of “tor(u).” One is an aspectual marker and the other is a modality marker. In this dialect, the “tor(u)” suffixing to adjectives or copulas expresses a modal meaning, i.e., a speaker’s assertive judgment about a proposition in the past. This modality marker “tor(u)” has the same characteristics as the typical modality markers.

This study examines the concept of understanding and its negative counterparts in Japanese Sign Language (JSL) from a cognitive linguistic perspective, mainly through the lens of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory. The lexicon and semantic network of JSL differ from those of spoken Japanese, which is its surrounding language. Cognitive linguistics analyzes semantic networks based on embodiment and experientialism. We found that the morphemes forming “not-understand” in JSL cannot be divided into a content word “understand” and a negative affix “not,” as represented in spoken Japanese “wakara-nai” (wakaru = ‘understand,’ nai = ‘not’). “Not-understand” shares its handshape and location with “understand” but differs in the movement and orientation of the hands. We discovered that different forms of “understand” and their negative counterparts, which characteristically employ oppositional embodiments, can be explained by Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) spatial metaphor, a type of conceptual metaphor: known is down, unknown is up. Additionally, signs related to the concepts of understanding were analyzed and found to be construed through the following metaphors: understanding is grasping, ideas are objects, and ideas are food. We suggest that these semantically related signs form a conceptual network that parallels the relationships between the oppositional forms of the signs.

In this article, we point out that what Hartman (2011) observes about how elided sentences with adjunct wh-phrases behave in English is not fully repeated in Mandarin Chinese, and aim to account for the difference between the two languages in terms of the different base positions of relevant adjuncts coupled with Hartman’s (2011) formulation of MaxElide, a condition requiring ellipsis to apply to the largest possible domain. In doing so, we provide a supportive argument for Takahashi and Fox’s (2005) and Hartman’s (2011) reformulation over Merchant’s (2008) original definition of the condition.