An interactional practice of registering expectation discrepancy: the use of the turn-initial token are in Japanese

ABSTRACT

This conversation analytic study offers an empirical analysis of the Japanese turn-initial interjection are. The interjectional are is said to be pragmatized from its use as a distal demonstrative and has been considered as an expression of a speaker’s internal state of being surprised at something. In contrast, this study argues that are is meticulously used for interactional purposes. Through the analysis of video- and audio-recorded noninstitutional conversation data, this study examines how speakers, by utilizing the turn-initial are, signal discrepancy in their expectation, assumption, or prior knowledge to accomplish various interactional tasks. This study does so by documenting are’s workings in two different sequential contexts, (i) are-prefaced display of noticing unexpected physical events during embodied activities and (ii) are-prefaced repair initiation as remediation in understanding. This research also examines prosodic features of are and points out a possible correlation between are’s prosodic features and are’s sequential locations.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Excerpts (1), (2), and (3) were originally written in Japanese. English translations were given by the author of this article.

2. This article used the software Praat developed by the Institute of Phonetic Sciences at the University of Amsterdam (https://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/).

3. Other-initiated repair sequences are a common instance that embodies source/outcome relationships (Schegloff, 2007, p. 217). The use of are-prefacing in other-initiated repair is discussed in the next section of Are-prefaced repair initiation as a process of remediation in understanding.

4. A reviewer pointed out a possibility that there may be cases when are-recipients have as little information of the unexpected events as are-speakers do and thus are unable to provide any solution or account for the situation. While the author agrees with the possibility, she could not find such cases in her current database. Examinations of how an absence of are-recipients’ solutions or accounts in response to are-prefaced turns remain as future research.

5. In a footnote, Hayashi (2009, pp. 2102–2103), with an example of a short excerpt, mentions that he found a small number of instances of eh responsive to events in the physical environment rather than to preceding talk. Hayashi did not provide detailed analysis of the example due to space limitations, but his note implies that the interactional working of are demonstrated in the previous section of this article (Are-prefaced display of noticing unexpected problems in physical environments) may somewhat overlap with that of eh. Comparative analyses of eh and are in response to physical events will remain as future research.

6. Conversations are organized around the unit of the adjacency pair, consisting of two turns: an FPP and an SPP. For instance, questions are FPPs: they make relevant a certain type of response, an answer. Most FPPs make relevant not only a certain type of response but also alternative types of response (Schegloff, 1968). Conversation analysts call these alternative types of response “‘preferred’” and “‘dispreferred’” responses (Pomerantz, 1978, 1984; Sacks, 1973/1987). The conversation analytic concept of preference does not refer to psychological preference, but to a structural relationship between parts of the sequence. Preferred responses are those that align with the activity which the FPP seeks to accomplish (e.g., agreement, acceptance, confirmation). Dispreferred responses are those that do not align with this activity (e.g., disagreement, refusal, disconfirmation).

7. Epistemic stance refers to persons’ stance toward certain information that is displayed through various resources deployed within actual utterances. Epistemic status refers to persons’ rights, responsibilities, and obligations to know something, and thus it is “inherently relative and relational” (Heritage, 2012b: 4). It is often the case that there is a more authoritative party (K+) and a less authoritative party (K-) in interaction. Participants can index the gradient of their knowledge difference in a variety of ways (Heritage, 2012b; Heritage & Raymond, 2012; Sidnell, 2010). For instance, questions of (a) “Where did you go?” (b) “Did you go to California?” and (c) “You went to California, didn’t you?” claim questioners’ different levels of preexisting access to the information under question. The question (a) expresses the largest knowledge gap between a questioner and a recipient, while the question (c) asserts a possible answer with some certainty (Heritage & Raymond, 2012).

8. Ken’s response in line 4 also indicates the preference for agreement. According to Sacks, (1973/1987, in response to polar questions, agreement (i.e., affirming the proposition advanced in the question) is generally preferred. Here, Ken, after the production of the negation token ya, designs his response so as to partially confirm the state of affairs depicted in the confirmation request.

9. Similar to Ken’s response in line 4 of excerpt (8), Machi’s response in line 9 here also indicates the preference for agreement. Machi designs her response so as to partially confirm the state of affairs depicted in the confirmation request.

10. A “no” response is used for a confirming answer to a negative interrogative in English (e.g., A: You don’t speak Japanese? B: No.).

11. Are-prefaced negative interrogatives can be illustrated as “reserved polarity questions (RPQs)” (Sacks, 1973/1987). RPQs refer to yes or no questions being reversed their polarity from affirmative to negative so as to address the possibility of disagreement and permit the respondent to affirm the state of affairs depicted in the reversed form. This operation is performed based on the general preference for agreement as response to polar questions. In Japanese, negatively polarized questions are often considered to embody either a negative suffix -nai (“not”) or -janai (the copula ja and a negative suffix -nai; Sugiura, 2017). For instance, the negative suffix -nai is deployed in the are-prefaced negative interrogative in Excerpt (9). In contrast, are-prefaced chigau?/chigatta? (is/was it wrong?) questions do not carry such negative suffixes, and thus they are not an outcome of reversing the polarity morpho-syntactically.