Revisiting grammatical particles from an interactional perspective: The case of the so-called ‘subject’ and ‘topic’ particles as pragmatic markers in Japanese and Korean: An introduction

This special issue contains seven papers addressing the ‘subject’ and/or ‘topic’ particles in Japanese and Korean from the perspectives of interactional linguistics and conversation analysis. The analyses presented in these papers (four on Japanese and three on Korean data) all pay detailed empirical attention to the structures of social interaction as crucial to understanding the interactional functions of these particles. In so doing, these analyses transcend some of the traditional confines of the field of linguistic enquiry. Instead of purporting to come up with a unified account of these particles, the papers closely attend to how they are employed by adult and child speakers alike as resources for organizing actions in everyday social life, e.g., accomplishing joint perception/activity, structuring recipiency, stance marking, or doing categorization. The insights they yield shed light on the interactional functions of these particles, enabling us to see that the notions of ‘subject’ and ‘topic’ fall considerably short of representing the dynamic and methodic ways in which they are actually used by the participants for a real-time management of the processes of communication and social interaction.