Language reproduction and coordinated agency through resonant play

Abstract

This article examines how creativity is jointly achieved in playful Japanese conversations, focusing on dialogicality in language form, meaning and the speaker’s agency. The analysis employs “dialogic syntax” and “stancetaking” as the theoretical frameworks of dialogicality and shows that dialogic engagement in talk-in-interaction engenders resonance, creating both similarities and contrasts in parallel structure across utterances. This study points out that such differentiations come from distinctive social actors situated in the indexical field of social life. Injecting stancetaking into dialogic syntax makes it possible to explicitly address the dialogic creation of socially meaningful language reproduction in tandem with constructing the stancetaker’s agency. Moreover, dialogic syntax and stancetaking shed important light on how a playful utterance creates priming effects, prepatterning the subsequent language reproduction in resonance, and prompting stancetakers’ affect to voluntarily contribute something new, engaging with the prior utterances, which develops the play framing activity and enhances shared pleasure.