Context dependence in language use has been studied in a wide range of its manifestations in linguistic phenomena: from anaphora, presupposition, indexicals, personal pronouns, sentence-final particles and other modal expressions, politeness, to common-grounding, repair, register, style or framing. Descriptive concepts and analytical frameworks, such as discourse representation, conversational scoreboard, information state update, contextualization cue, and deictic field, have also been proposed to capture those phenomena in a number of different disciplines approaching language, most notably in semantics/pragmatics, sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology.

The concept of BA, taken from the Japanese word for 'place' or 'field', has been proposed by Japanese biological and social scientist to provide an abstract conceptual basis on which to capture dynamics in interactive phenomena, such as dynamic order formation in living organisms (Shimizu, 1990), or knowledge creation in business management (Nonaka & Konno, 1998).

When applied to human language use, BA concept emphasizes the significance of the place, both physically and mentally conceived, in which human interactions take place. BA simultaneously works, for the participants, to affect their construals of linguistic acts performed, and to exert normative forces to regulate their linguistic behavior choices committed in the BA. The concept of wakimae (or 'discernment') (Ide, 2006) is an example of BA-sensitive, in contrast to the more conventional face-based, conception of the underlying mechanism of linguistic politeness behaviors, which has proven to be highly successful.

The aim of this workshop series is to provide a venue for researchers who are interested in BA concept to get together to exchange their works, ideas and perspectives, both empirical and theoretical, to deepen our understanding of BA and explore its relationships to our language practices.

• participation by invitation only:
  Application has been closed due to accounting scheduling reasons.
  Prospective participate should send requests for attendance by email to harada at waseda dot jp:
  subject: ba-workshop 2016/03/26-27
  message body: name / affiliation / position / email address / short bio
  with 300 to 500 word position statement on how you are interested in our approach.
• on-site registration for invited participants:
  Registration desk is closed in the morning. It opens during lunch and other breaks in the afternoon.
• Dates and Venue
  • Dates: March 26th Saturday and 27th Sunday, 2016
  • Venue: Meeting Room on the 3rd Floor of Building 8, Waseda University
    Nishi-Waseda 1-6-1, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 169-8050, Japan
  • NB. Building 8 may be closed on March 27th as it is a Sunday. In this case, you should enter through a glass door that has to be pulled open located to the right of the automatic sliding glass door that you find to your left as you enter the main campus through the South Gate.
  • access and location:
    • https://www.waseda.jp/top/en/access
    • https://www.waseda.jp/top/en/access/waseda-campus
• confirmed invited speakers (in alphabetic order of surnames):
  • Jae-Woong Choe, Professor of Linguistics and Director at the Institute for Digital Humanities, Korea University
    http://wizard.korea.ac.kr/user/kufaculty/3_15-01.html
  • William F. Hanks, Distinguished Chair Professor in Linguistic Anthropology, University of California Berkeley
    http://anthropology.berkeley.edu/people/william-f-hanks
  • Yoshihiro Miyake, Professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology
    http://www.myk.dis.titech.ac.jp
  • Norihiro Sadato, Professor at National Institute for Physiology
    http://www.nips.ac.jp/fmritms/english/member/sadato-profile.html
  • Scott Saft, Associate Professor in the Ka Haka'Ula o Ke'elikõlani College of Hawaiian Language at the University of Hawaii at Hilo
    
  • Gunter Senft, Senior Investigator at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen and Professor for General Linguistics, University of Cologne
    http://www.mpi.nl/people/senft-gunter
• jointly hosted by:
  • The Institute for Digital Enhancement of Cognitive Development, Waseda University
  • The Institute for the Study of Language and Information, Waseda University
• financially supported in part by:
  • Comprehensive Research Organization, Waseda University
• financially supported in part by and organized in conjunction with:

  Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (A)	15H01771	PI: Yoshihiro Miyake	Realtime Visualization System of Communication Field for Co-Creative Teaching Support
  Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B)	15H03226	PI: Yasunari Harada	Analysis and Modeling of Autonomous Mutual Learning through Interaction by Japanese Learners of English
  Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B)	15H03208	PI: Yoko Fujii	Construction of a Pragmatic Model of BA: Cross-linguistic Realistic Data Analyses Based on Native Speakers Points of View
  Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)	26370461	PI: Masayuki Otsuka	Development of of the Theory of BA in Language and Communication: Solving Problems in Modern Societies
  Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)	25370733	PI: Kishiko Ueno	A Contrastive Study of Question-Asking in Japanese and English
  Grants-in-Aid for Challenging Exploratory Research	26580074	PI: Yasuhiro Katagiri	Construction of Linguistics of BA: BA and Emergence of Meaning
  Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B)	24720193	PI: Makiko Takekuro	A linguistic anthropological analysis of social interaction: The intersection of language, gesture, and environment in Ishigaki
  Waseda University Grant for Special Research Projects (Continuing Research)	2015K-021	PI: Sachiko Shudo	Politeness-triggered manipulation of pragmatic constraints and its influence on semantic change

• Yasuhiro Katagiri, Opening Remarks
  
• William F. Hanks, Basho: A theory of communicative interaction
  This paper investigates the concept of Ba/Basho, with the aim of applying it to the analysis of situated verbal interaction. It starts from the contrast between approaches to honorific usage and "face" based on the work of Erving Goffman on the one hand, and those based on Ba theory as developed by members of the Emancipatory Pragmatics group, on the other. A three-way distinction is proposed between (1) Primary Ba understood as the ontological condition of non-separation rooted in Asian thought (with special reference to Buddhism), (2) Secondary Ba understood as the subsuming context of human sociality, based on separation, articulation and relationality, and (3) Ba Theory, a meta-theory that relates (1) and (2) in a variety of domains, including communicative practice. As developed by Professor Hiroshi Shimizu, Ba theory seeks to explain the emergence of information in complex systems, by the interaction of two orders of representation, the one holistic and the other egocentric. Key problems addressed in the theory are reflexivity, interiority, union and separation. This framework is briefly compared to phenomenology and the pragmatism of George Herbert Mead. The paper argues that deixis (referential indexicality) is a privileged domain in which Ba theory provides an elegant explanatory framework for the projection of individuated referents on the ground of holistic indexical context. The core concepts of place, corporeal schema, corporeal field, and referential deixis, all well established in pragmatics, are re-described through the lens of Ba theory.
• Norihiro Sadato, Shared attention and inter-individual neural synchronization in the human right inferior frontal cortex
  Face-to-face interactants can share attention through eye-contact and joint attention that are tightly coupled. Hyper-scanning fMRI in pairs of adults conducting joint attention showed the inter-individual neural synchronization in the right inferior frontal gyrus after all the task-related effects were modeled out. To explore how the joint attention and eye-contact generates the state of shared attention, we conducted hyper-scanning fMRI in which pairs of participants performed a real-time mutual gaze before and after the joint attention. Eye-blink synchronization, a behavioral index of shared attention, during mutual gaze increased after the joint attention. Increment of eye-blink synchronization was positively correlated with the increment of the inter-individual neural synchronization within the right inferior frontal gyrus during mutual gaze. This enhanced neural synchronization was also positively correlated with enhanced eye-blink synchronization during the previous joint attention. Thus shared attention is represented and retained by pair-specific neural synchronization of the right inferior frontal gyrus.
• Risako Ide, Co-constructing personal narratives: Understanding "resonant thin laughter" from the BA perspective
  This paper looks into the narratives of the March 11, 2011 earthquake experiences as told by and collected by the University of Tsukuba students during May, 2012. I focus my analysis on how the listeners of the narratives co-construct the highlight of the telling through their usage of laughter, interjections, overlaps, co-constructed utterances and dialogues. Paying close attention to what I call the "resonant thin laughter" observed throughout the data which indexes affect and corporeal co-presence or communion (Ide 2015), I discuss how the pre-set speaker and listeners roles get inevitably blurred within the BA of the telling.
• Jae-Woong Choe, Semantic and Pragmatic Characteristics of Korean Honorific Pronouns
  According to a representative dictionary of modern Korean, 'The Standard Dictionary of Korean', there are 472 pronouns in the Korean language, and among them 267 turn out to be marked for honorific function in their definition. Starting from this rather unusually large number of honorification related pronouns in Korean, this paper provides a detailed analysis of the whole data from the semantic and pragmatic point of view. Section 2 discusses some specific methods and criteria for the extraction of the list of honorification related pronouns from the dictionary. In Section 3, an analysis framework is proposed which combines three dimensions of meaning, that is, Referential dimension, Expressive dimension, and Genre dimension. It is claimed that the three-dimensional approach to the meaning of the Korean (anti-)honorific pronouns provides an optimal framework in which most of the semantic and pragmatic aspects of the data can be described appropriately.
  
• Scott Saft, Exploring the Applications of Ba-theory to Hawaiian Society and Hawaiian Language Interaction
  A frequent complaint of people born and raised in Hawaii, particularly those who speak the Hawaiian language, is that the perspectives and worldviews of people who come to Hawaii from the mainland United States tend be very different. In contrast to people from the mainland who may have been taught to view themselves as privileged individuals, those raised in a Hawaiian worldview often come to understand their bodies only as extensions of the environment in which they exist, including an interconnection with the kupuna (elders), the spiritual world, and the land itself. This presentation attempts to explicate a Hawaiian approach by describing some language practices used by speakers of Hawaiian in Hawaiian interaction. In particular, the presentation focuses on pronoun usage and also the usage of repetitions, two practices by which Hawaiian speakers interrelate with one another. Ultimately, the analysis relies on the concept of ba to understand the social organization constructed by speakers of Hawaiian; language practices such as pronouns and repetitions enable the speakers of Hawaiian to merge together in their ba, thus achieving the interconnections that tie them together as Hawaiian.
• Yoshihiro Miyake, TBA
  
• Yoko Fujii, A Predicate-oriented Language and Pragmatics of Ba
  This presentation demonstrates that Japanese is a predicate-oriented language induced by ba-oriented culture. Ba-oriented culture assumes; 1) self-organization in ba, 2) situation-focus or holistic construal of the world, and 3) internal point of view. These assumptions are conveyed in Japanese which has abundant linguistic phenomena showing a ba-predominant order of representations, no-agent/subject clause structures, and holistic expressions. Instead, the predicate subsumes agency and information with regard to person references in terms of honorific forms, "giving" and "receiving" forms, "become"-type of expressions rather than "do"-type, and modal expressions including final particles and descriptions from an internal point of view. This presentation attempts to claim that these linguistic phenomena are characterized as constituting a pragmatics of ba, which is rooted in a ba-oriented organization of the self and internal construal of the world from the self in ba.
• Kishiko Ueno, An Interpretation of Merging Discourse in Terms of Ba Theory
  Japanese conversation is often called Kyowa "cooperative speech" (Mizutani, 1993). Kyowa implies that the speaker and the hearer cooperate to construct an utterance rather than making dialogic conversation. I examine two sets of Japanese discourse data which I call "merging discourse," a unique type of cooperative speech in which a story teller and listener speak as if they share a single mind and are composing the story together. I discuss the means by which and ends toward which the story teller and the listener are able to co-create one story, concluding that this logic is primarily one of pleasure. In this connection, the idea of "dual mode thinking" proves useful. This idea, taken from ba theory (Shimizu 2003), claims that a self consists of two layers: the domain of the egocentric self and the domain of place. It is in the domain of place that the story teller and listener can merge, and it is the existence of this domain that makes it possible for them to speak as if they share one mind.
• Naohiro Tatara, Communicative Strategies in Live Football Coverage in Japanese and English: On Linguistic Behavior Used in Criticizing Others in Sports Announcer Talks
  The aims of this presentation are to examine the communicative strategies of English and Japanese speakers in live football commentaries specifically focusing on the linguistic behaviour used in criticizing players, and endeavour to elucidate how and why speakers of each of the languages show differences in forming the discourse of criticism. It is also pointed out that English and Japanese speakers use the same cognitive resources in different ways and also refer to different resources in the same events to construct live football commentaries.
• Gunter Senft, "Control your emotions! If teasing provokes you, you've lost your face...": The Trobriand Islanders' control of their public display of emotions
  Kilivila, the Austronesian language of the Trobriand Islanders of Papua New Guinea, has a rich inventory of terms - nouns, verbs, adjectives and idiomatic phrases and expressions - to precisely refer to, and to differentiate emotions and inner feelings. This talk describes how the Trobriand Islanders of Papua New Guinea deal with the public display of emotions. Forms of emotion control in public encounters are discussed and explained on the basis of ritual communication which pervades the Trobrianders' verbal and non-verbal behaviour. Especially highlighted is the Trobrianders' metalinguistic concept of "biga sopa" with its important role for emotion control in encounters that may run the risk of escalating from argument and conflict to aggression and violence.
• William Hanks, TBA
  
• Sachiko Ide, Closing Remarks
  

• Jae-Woong Choe is Professor at Linguistics Department and Director at the Institute for Digital Humanities of Korea University
• Tomoko Endo is Postdoctoral Research Fellow of Japan Society for the Promotion of Sciences, affiliated with the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at University of Tsukuba. Her research interests include Interactional Linguistics of Mandarin, Japanese and English, stancetaking, and caregiver-child interaction.
• Yoko Fujii is Professor of Japan Women's University and Prinsipal Investigator of Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B), No. 15H03208, "Construction of a Pragmatic Model of BA: Cross-linguistic Realistic Data Analyses Based on Native Speakers Points of View."
• WILLIAM F. HANKS earned the Joint PhD in Anthropology and Linguistics at The University of Chicago, 1983. Since 2000, he has held the Berkeley Distinguished Chair in Linguistic Anthropology and is Affiliated Professor, Department of Linguistics (2003-Present) at University of California, Berkeley. In 2013, he became the first Director of Social Science Matrix, a cross-disciplinary research institute in the Social Sciences at Berkeley. His research bears on semantics and pragmatics, with a special focus on indexicality in interaction, ordinary referring and ritual speech in Yucatec Maya. He also works in translation theory, colonial history, missionary linguistics and the formation of modern Maya language. His relevant books include REFERENTIAL PRACTICE, LANGUAGE AND LIVED SPACE AMONG THE MAYA (U Chicago Press 1990), LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATIVE PRACTICES, (Westview Press 1995) and CONVERTING WORDS, MAYA IN THE AGE OF THE CROSS (U California Press, winner of the Edward Sapir Book Prize, Society for Linguistic Anthropology and the Staley Book Prize, School of Advanced Research).
  Selected Other Positions Held: Professor of Anthropology, Linguistics and CB Smith Centennial Chair in US-Mexico Relations, University of Texas at Austin (2009-2010); Professor of Anthropology, Milton H. Wilson Chair Professor of Humanities, (1996-2000) Northwestern University; Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics, University of Chicago (1983-1996). He has been Visiting Professor in Spain, Denmark, Finland, Italy and regularly teaches in Paris, France (EHESS, University of Paris), where he is a member of the Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale, College de France.
• Yasunari Harada is Professor at Faculty of Law and Director at the Institute for Digital Enhancement of Cognitive Development of Waseda University and was Principal Investigator for Grants-in-Aid for Exploratory Research, "Toward Construction of Linguistics of BA: Semantics and Pragmatics of BA." He is currently a Steering Committee member of PACLIC.
• Kaoru Horie is Professor of Linguistics at Nagoya University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California. His research interest centers around the typological description and explanation of grammatical phenomena, and the pragmatic / interactional motivations for cross-linguistic variability of grammatical phenomena.
• Risako Ide is Associate Professor at the University of Tsukuba, Doctoral Program in International and Advanced Japan Studies. She has received her Ph.D. in Linguistic Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include small talk in the United States, narrative, and conversational humor.
• Sachiko Ide is former President of International Pragmatics Association, Professor Emeritus at Japan Women's University and Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Language and Information of Waseda University.
• Yasuhiro Katagiri is Professor at Future University Hakodate and Principal Investigator of Grants-in-Aid for Challenging Exploratory Research, No. 26580074, "Construction of Linguistics of BA: BA and Emergence of Meaning."
• Kuniyoshi Kataoka is Professor at Faculty of Letters, Aichi University. He received his Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics (major in sociolinguistics) at University of Arizona. His research interests include emotive communication and spatial reference through verbal/non-verbal modalities.
• Mayumi Kawamura is a language annotator, working with Yasunari Harada for the past 10 years on segmentation, transcription and behavioral annotation of Japanese EFL learners' interactional learning activities.
• Kanako Maebo is a post-graduate student at a Ph.D. Program of Hitotsubashi University.
• Yoshihiro Miyake is Professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology: http://www.myk.dis.titech.ac.jp
• Miwa Morishita is Associate Professor at Faculty of Global Communication of Kobe Gakuin University and Research Fellow at the Institute for Digital Enhancement of Cognitive Development of Waseda University.
• Shunsuke Nozawa is Project Associate Professor in the Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies at the University of Tokyo.
• Tomoyuki OKA is Professor at Tokyo Gakugei University. His research interest is to construct a Japanese grammar from the viewpoint of BA theory. He has studied on Japanese aspect, case particles, and so on and he is also interested in contrastive studies of Japanese and Korean. His main published work is Linguistics of Place (Hitsuji Publisher) in 2013.
• Norihiro Sadato is Professor at National Institute for Physiology. In 1983, he graduated from Kyoto University School of Medicine. In 1994, he completed the doctoral course in Medical Sciences, Kyoto University. During 1993-95, he was Visiting Research Fellow, NINDS, NIH. In 1995, he was appointed Lecturer at Fukui Medical University. In 1998, he was promoted to Associate Professor at Fukui Medical University. In 1999, he was appointed Professor at NIPS. Specialty: Functional Neuroimaging and Neuroscience.
• Kazuo Sakai is Professor at School of Law of Meiji University.
• Chikako Sakurai is Associate Professor at Musashino University. Her research interests include language acquisition, language socialization and politeness.
• Scott Saft is an Associate Professor in the Ka Haka'Ula o Ke'elikõlani College of Hawaiian Language at the University of Hawaii at Hilo. He is Chair of the Linguistics Program and also Chair of Graduate Studies.
• Gunter Senft is Senior Investigator at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen and Professor for General Linguistics, University of Cologne. Specialist in Austronesian languages, especially Kilivila, the language of the Trobriand Islanders. Central interests: Austronesian and Papuan languages, nominal classification, categorization, conceptualization of space, semantics and pragmatics, typology, anthropological linguistics, language / culture / cognition, endangered languages. See website: http://www.mpi.nl/people/senft-gunter
• Sachiko Shudo is Professor of English and Linguistics in Waseda University's Faculty of Law in Tokyo. She obtained her PhD in linguistics from Georgetown University in 1998. Her dissertation, The Presupposition and the Discourse Function of the Japanese Particle mo, was published in Routledge's Outstanding Dissertation in Linguistics Series in 2002. Her main research interests include pragmatic issues involving presupposition. She is currently Principal Investigator for Waseda University Grant for Special Research Projects (Continuing Research) entitled "Politeness-triggered manipulation of pragmatic constraints and its influence on semantic change."
• Makiko Takekuro is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law at Waseda University and Principal Investigator for the Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B) No.24720193, entitled, "A linguistic anthropological analysis of social interaction: The intersection of language, gesture, and environment in Ishigaki." She is editor-in-chief of the proceeding volume (to be published online soon) for the first International Workshop on Linguistics of BA held in December of 2011 at Waseda University.
• Naohiro Tatara is Associate Professor at J. F. Oberlin University.
• Kishiko Ueno is Lecturer at Tokyo City University and Principal Investigator of Grants-in-Aid of Scientific Research (C), No. 25370733, "Questions in Conversation: A Comparative Study of Japanese and English Speakers."
• Hiroaki Yamada is a senior (fourth-year) student at the undergraduate School of Law of Waseda University. In addition to his major in legal studies, he has studied extensively on issues pertaining to the study of language and information and is going to a graduate school in that field.
• Masataka Yamaguchi was lecturer in New Zealand and Australia between 2005 and 2015. He commences his new position as Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics at Kobe City University of Foreign Studies in 2016. He is on the editorial board of Discourse, Context, and Media (Elsevier).
• Daisuke Yokomori is Assistant Professor at the Department of Linguistic Environment, Faculty of Languages and Cultures of Kyushu University. He received his PhD in linguistics from Kyoto University in 2013. His research interests are in the areas of Interactional Linguistics and Conversation Analysis.

• past
  • July 4th Saturday and 5th Sunday, 2015, Future University Hakodate, Hokkaido
    The Second International Workshop on Linguistics of BA:
    http://www.decode.waseda.ac.jp/announcement/2015-07-04-05-e.html
  • January 3rd to January 5th, 2013, University of California, Berkeley, California
    Berkeley Workshop on Emancipatory Pragmatics:
    http://www.decode.waseda.ac.jp/announcement/2015-07-04-05-e.html
  • December 10th and 11th, 2011, Waseda University, Tokyo
    An International Workshop on Linguistics of BA:
    http://www.decode.waseda.ac.jp/announcement/2011-12-10-11-j.html
  • November 6th, 2010, Tohoku University, Sendai.
    Symposium: Toward a Linguistic Theory of Ba: Semantics and Pragmatics of Ba, a special symposium in in PACLIC 24: The 24th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation:
    http://www.compling.jp/paclic24/speakers.html#symp2
  • December 26th, 2009, Waseda University, Tokyo
    A Public Forum for Designing the Future in the Age of the Earth: development of the logic of Ba
    http://www.decode.waseda.ac.jp/announcement-for-2009-12-26-j.html

• Copyright for this web page © 2015-2016 Institute for DECODE, Waseda University, except for the purpose statement of the workshop series, the titles, abstracts, slides and handouts of the talks announced and short biographical descriptions of the speakers, moderators, organizers and participants. All rights reserved.
• First drafted July 6th, 2015. Last revised December 27th, 2016
• The meetings and talks announced in this web page are subject to change without prior notice. The organizers should not be held responsible for any purported or actual damages by prospective participants due to those changes.