Play has attracted a great deal of attention in the scholarship of anthropology (Bateson 1972, Bauman 1977, Sherzer 1990), yet its interactional dimensions through language still remain largely unexplored. The purpose of this study is to provide an analysis of the interactional and sequential processes whereby speech participants manipulate the frames (Bateson 1972, Goffman 1974, 1981, Tannen 1993) of play. Play in this study is viewed as a speech activity involving irrealis modality, which often appears as conversational humor, such as joking, teasing, mocking, talking about a humorous or imaginative scenario, role-playing, and so on. Since play is spontaneous, dynamic, and implicitly performed, speech participants constantly monitor and negotiate their positioning in and out of a play frame. To do so, they use a variety of linguistic resources, which I call play stance indices. I argue that stance-taking is essential to frame local speech activity and therefore, playful stance-taking is a necessary act for framing the local speech activity as play.

The data are drawn from audio-taped naturally occurring casual conversations among Japanese friends and family members. This study particularly investigates interactions in which the speakers take an active role in play framing.

My analysis consists of three parts. The first part examines the sequential organization of play and proposes a model of the stages of play, paying particular attention to how play is initiated, maintained, and discarded. The second part of the analysis is focused on play frames, showing that resonance, the recycling of linguistic resources (Du Bois 1999), plays a key role in maintaining and developing play frames. I discuss seven types of resonance (lexical, syntactic, phonological, stylistic, semantic, pragmatic, and cultural), among which multiple types of resonance often co-occur. The third part of the analysis demonstrates grammaticized play stance indices in resonance in play frames. I argue that in Japanese quotative markers, a simile marker, and a conjoining morpheme have all grammaticized into a single functional category, that of play stance indices. This study brings close analysis of the interactional and sequential aspects of play to existing linguistic studies of humor. It also describes for the first time the Japanese linguistic devices that mark play stances.