Makoto Hayashi

(Ph.D. Colorado)
Associate Professor of EALC and Linguistics:

Japanese language and linguistics, conversation analysis, interactional linguistics (the study of the relationship between grammar and social interaction, between language and bodily conduct in interaction).

217-333-7036
mhayashi@uiuc.edu

Makoto Hayashi specializes in discourse-functional linguistics and conversation analysis. His research interests revolve around the issue of how we can re-conceptualize what we think of as 'grammar' by closely examining naturally-occurring language use in social interaction. His research thus explores how we can understand the organization of grammar, not as something hardwired in the human mind as an a priori set of abstract rules, but as something emergent as a complex response to its ecological setting - the communicative and interactional needs speakers face in participating in everyday activities that make up their social life. He pursued this line of inquiry in his book from John Benjamins, 2003, entitled Joint Utterance Construction in Japanese Conversation, as well as in his recent articles, "Projection and grammar: Notes on the 'action-projecting' use of the distal demonstrative are in Japanese" (in Journal of Pragmatics) and "Discourse within a sentence: An exploration of postpositions in Japanese as an interactional resource" (in Language in Society). He teaches graduate-level courses on "grammar and interaction" and "language and gesture", among others.