Joint Utterance Construction in Japanese Conversation (Studies in Discourse & Grammar)

This text is concerned with how participants in Japanese conversation negotiate and achieve joint courses of action in the midst of a single turn to talk by employing "joint utterance construction". Joint utterance construction here refers to a domain of practices by which a speaker produces an utterance that is designed to grammatically continue (and sometimes complete) an ongoing utterance initiated by another speaker. Using the methodology of conversation analysis as a central framework the book describes in detail the structures and procedures used by Japanese speakers to jointly produce a coherent grammatical unit-in-progress, and additionally, it explores the range of social actions that speakers accomplish by employing that practice.