Highlighted moves within an action: Segmented talk in Japanese conversation

Abstract

Japanese conversational data reveal that Japanese speakers produce, and recipients orient to, smaller units of talk than what the conventional notion of a 'turn constructional unit' (TCU) represents. Unlike TCUs, such units may be grammatically, prosodically and pragmatically incomplete and may happen on the sub-phrasal level of discourse, as Japanese conversationalists prosodically break up even a single semantic constituent with the insertion of an interactional particle. In this article, I give numerous examples of how such practices of separating a segment of talk are not random but are precisely embedded in the sequential organization of talk that participants co-create. I argue that such segmentation contributes to the interactional co-construction of a turn so as to highlight specifically a 'move' Within the larger action that is implemented by the TCU. Doing so thereby provides opportunities for the participants to deal with local contingency problems without changing the global level of the pragmatic work of the turn. Copyright © 2008 SAGE Publication.