Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

476 Part 6: Language and Interaction
Eglin, 1997; Silverman, 1998; Watson, 1997). Instead of explaining participants’
conduct as a product of culture, MCA elucidates how people talk
culture into being through using social categories.
After Sacks’s untimely death in 1975, CA and MCA went their separate
ways, with CA turning into the more infl uential and elaborated approach
by far. However, researchers in both traditions increasingly argue that the
production and understanding of actions and action sequences are both
categorial and sequential and that the separate analytical strands need to
be brought together (e.g. Edwards, 1998; Hester & Eglin, 1997; Talmy, 2009;
Watson, 1997).
The proposed synthesis is illustrated well in the fi rst studies of intercultural
interaction from a combined CA and MCA (M/CA) perspective. In
his seminal analysis of a radio program titled ‘My Methods of Learning
Japanese’, aired in Japan in the 1990s, Nishizaka (1995, also 1999) argues
that ‘interculturality’ 11 has to be treated as an interactional accomplishment.
In the show, the Japanese host interviews non-Japanese students
about their language learning and related experiences in Japan. Nishizaka’s
analysis is animated by Sacks’s (1972) observation that through their talk,
participants not only invoke individual categories, but assemble categories
into collections. By using the paired categories (‘standardized relational
pair’) ‘Japanese person (nihonjin)–foreigner (gaikokujin)’, the host and
guest make the collection ‘cultural memberships’ relevant. Each of the two
categories is associated with normatively expected and mutually exclusive
entitlements. Ownership of the Japanese language, displayed through
claims to understanding, passing judgment and giving advice how to
speak the language, and knowledge about ‘Japanese nature’, such as locating
and identifying by name mountains and rivers in Japan’s geography,
are treated by the host as predicates bound to the category ‘Japanese
person’. 12 Conversely, the ‘foreigner’ is normatively expected to display
limited expertise in these matters. The strength of such expectations
becomes especially apparent in their breach. When the host proposes that
technical words pose a particular diffi culty for the nonnative speaker, the
guest denies, pointing out that technical terms are typically composed of
Chinese characters and that these are easier for him to understand and
pronounce than (the longer and semantically less transparent) words of
Japanese origin. After a lengthy exchange on the topic, in which the participants
make and contest claims to epistemic authority through formulations,
interactional particles and change-of-state tokens, the host concludes
by describing the guest as a henna gaijin (‘strange foreigner’), a category
term implying that the incumbent appropriates entitlements that are not
his – in this case, knowing things about the Japanese language that are
properly known only by native speakers.
A fi nal signifi cant observation from Nishizaka’s studies is that participants
may contingently re-assemble categories into different collections.