Saori Daiju

Saori Daiju is from Japan, where she received MA in English Linguistics in 2016 at Keio University. In her MA program, she studied Japanese Linguistics under the supervision of Professor Tsuyoshi Ono. Taking a discourse-functional approach to grammar, she worked on the demonstrative are ‘that’ which does not have a specific referent in spoken discourses. Although this type of are conveys little semantic content, participants often continue talking while leaving the referent unspecified as if they share an understanding that the vague identification of the referent is good enough to go on. In addition, the unspecified are is used in two specific formats, suggesting that it has been grammaticized as formulaic expressions. To try to figure out how this understudied use of the demonstrative relates to its typical use, she on differentiating between various are sequences from discourse data.