In a reenactment, a speaker re-presents or depicts a previously occurring event, often dramatically. In this article we examine the role of gaze in reenactments in conversations from Japanese and American English. Following Goodwin in viewing a reenacted story as ‘a multi-modal, multi-party field of activity’, we show how tellers’ and recipients’ gaze during reenactments is deployed to achieve specific interactional ends. We argue that there are two layers of activities involved in doing reenacting – a) the habitat of the (...) original event; b) the habitat of the reenacting event, including the dynamics of gaining appreciative recipiency – and show how they are interwoven in the joint production of a reenactment. (shrink)

Since the inception of modern approaches to grammar, Japanese ga has been treated as a marker indicating the grammatical relation `subject.' If this is an accurate characterization of ga, then we would expect ga to occur to mark a grammatical category consisting of `A' and `S'. Our examination of the contexts in which ga is actually used in everyday Japanese conversations shows that this expectation is not borne out. Our findings suggest that it is not appropriate to describe ga in (...) terms of a grammatical relation such as `subject', and that ga may be much less a grammatical marker than a discourse-pragmatic one. (shrink)