Emi Morita, Negotiation of contingent talk: The Japanese interactional particles ne and sa. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2005. Pp. xvi, 240. Hb $138.00.

The large category of Japanese words or morphemes commonly labeled “particles,” or in Japanese joshi, has long been problematic for linguistics. This in large part is due to the variety of apparent grammatical or pragmatic functions the category encompasses. While some particles seem to function as more or less straightforward postpositions, others are said to mark case or discourse functions, and still others have pragmatic functions but no clearly agreed syntactic or semantic position. The two particles tackled by Emi Morita's new book, ne and sa, are of this last variety. Morita argues that these “interactional particles” serve important roles of marking stance or activity in ongoing talk-in-interaction. As Morita puts it, “The insertion of interactional particles may serve to ‘salientize’ or ‘set apart’ certain units of talk in order to make them interactionally relevant to immediately adjacent action” (p. 95).