Makoto Hayashi
   Associate Professor
   Dept. of East Asian Languages & Cultures
   Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
   2090 Foreign Languages Building
   707 S. Mathews Avenue
   Urbana, IL 61801 USA
   email: mhayashi at illinois.edu

           I teach in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at University of Illinois,
           Urbana-Champaign.  My research focuses on examining language as it is used in
           everyday conversation.  One of the main themes of my work is to explore structural
           orderliness in language use (which we think of as 'grammar') as an emergent, embodied,
           and activity-bound phenomenon.  This theme is pursued in my book, Joint Utterance
           Construction in Japanese Conversation (2003) as well as in a number of journal articles
           and book chapters (see my Publications).  My work draws on Conversation Analysis as a
           framework for discovering orderly ways in which humans deploy language to participate
           in everyday activities and jointly construct the social world they inhabit. 

           My research reconceptualizes 'grammar' as emergent, arising as a complex response to its
           ecological setting - communicative and interactional needs speakers face in participating
           in everyday activities.  Grammar, in this view, not only provides resources for organizing
           linguistic elements in utterances, but its very structure emerges out of recurrent patterns
           of verbal (and nonverbal) practices shaped by interactional activities speakers engage in.
           My work thus challenges the assumption (often held by traditional linguists) that
           grammar is an atemporal, autonomous mental structure independent of communicative
           language use.