This study reports on some of the features and practices of sense making involved in the work of explicating the normative order of language use. The normative order of interest is (what Wittgenstein would call) the grammar of the concept justification. The data consists in the author's mundane work of figuring out in what context some type of talk would count as "doing justifying." The warrant for this enterprise issues from ethnomethodology's concern with sense making, or practical reasoning. While ethnomethodologists have addressed accounting and interpretive practices, the phenomenon under investigation here is of a different, previously unexplored type: "figuring out." In order to prepare for the analysis consideration is given in Part One to three questions: What are the "features and practices of sense making?" What analytic status must such features and practices have in order to be of ethnomethodological interest? How can the features and practices of figuring out grammar be best studied? Ordinary language philosophy is drawn on to answer the first two questions. A distinction is made between natural and social science in terms of the source of, and constraints on their concept formation and use. This distinction provides for seeing why it is that natural science can have a technical language while social science only can make technical use of ordinary language. That technical use is argued to depend for its sensibility cm the indexical limits of ordinary use. Features and practices of sense making thus turn out to be whatever members sanctionably can call features and practices of sense making. Some claims in ethnomethodology are found not to meet this indexical criterion. The answer to the second question has been that invariant or formal properties are of interest. Different versions of invariance are located in the literature. Using Wittgenstein's argument against essentialism the search for universal invariance is rendered questionable. Instead, particular invariance and type-invariance are claimed to be discoverable and warrantable within the limits of ordinary language. In addition the argument is put forward that (repeatable) contingent practices deserve attention. The third question is answered by considering and comparing a third person and a first person approach to studying figuring out. In terms of contingent practices it is found that a third person approach faces a problem of indexicality, whereas a first person approach does not, or if it does, it can survive it. Methods of ethnomethodological reduction and eidetic variation are discussed. In Part Two the concepts of meaning, force and grammar are introduced and explicated. These concepts are then used in presenting the normative order that governs the use of the concept of justification. Consideration is then given to how the generation of that normative order (grammar) is to be viewed analytically. Using a first person approach in Part Three, the author's own work of figuring out the grammar of justification becomes the topic of study. That study is written and furnished as a "journey": the analysis of each practice is developed in response to the properties of the phenomena, and each analysis draws and builds on the prior one. Four contingent practices are analyzed: calling, filling, grounding, and answering-seeking. As well, three features are found to be essential to figuring out: pre-reflective knowing, pre-reflective awareness of possibly knowing and orienting-to-grammaticality. Together these seven properties reveal that figuring out has a structure fundamentally different from accounting and interpreting. Through a consideration of these seven properties and other features an argument is provided in Part Four against using the Weber-Schutz version of social action as a resource for defining ethnomethodology's domain. Instead, it is argued that ethnomethodology's domain and phenomena are coextensive: the social is sense making. / Arts, Faculty of / Sociology, Department of / Graduate

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by Xu Yulong. / Thesis (M.A.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1984 / Bibliography: leaves 170-176

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Thesis (M.S.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 41-46).

Revision of dissertation (Ph.D)--State University of New York, Buffalo - "Demonstratives in cross-linguistic and diachronic perspective". / Includes index. Includes bibliographical references at the end of each section.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 231-238).

Word order universals constitute a well-known problem in language typology, first outlined in Greenberg (1963). It has been firmly established in databases of over 1500 languages that languages with verb-object ordering are very likely to have prepositions and noun-genitive ordering, while languages with object-verb ordering are very likely to have postpositions and genitive-noun ordering (Dryer and Haspelmath 2011). This thesis attempts to give a historical explanation for these facts in terms of the origin of syntactic categories: adpositions have historically developed from nouns and verbs (Givon 1984, Aristar 1991); and verbs often develop from nominalizations used with a genitive object. These types of grammaticalization can explain why adpositions retain the ordering of their source nouns or verbs, and why verb/object ordering often parallels noun/genitive ordering. This historical explanation is elaborated on, with data from different language families. Examples of verbs grammaticalizing from nominalizations used with genitive objects are given, drawing on historical work such as Salanova (2007) on Brazilian Jê languages and Starosta, Pawley and Reid (1982) on Austronesian. Different languages show varying degrees of 'nominalism', the morphosyntactic resemblance between verb forms and noun phrases/nominalizations. Other languages show a less developed distinction between adpositions and verbs/nouns. These examples of gradience in syntactic categories are argued to be behind resemblances in word orderings. Language contact is responsible for preserving word order types, when languages undergo change in more than one word order (e.g. Greenberg 1969); and the difference in rates of word order change across constructions is argued to be behind hierarchies such as Hawkins (1983)'s Prepositional Noun Modifier Hierarchy. This explanation of word order universals contrasts with more mainstream accounts such as Hawkins (1994) in terms of processing efficiency, and Kirby and Christiansen (2003) in terms of learnability. While these explanations are perhaps compatible with the historical explanation, they are argued to be redundant; grammaticalization arguably is not driven or constrained by learnability and processing efficiency, with memetics, 'typological poise' (Enfield 2003) and language contact given as alternatives. Instead of reflecting functional biases, word order patterns are argued to reflect language history, both the history of language contact, and the history of syntactic categories developing through grammaticalization. / published_or_final_version / Linguistics / Master / Master of Philosophy