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  • Turn-taking in Japanese conversation: A study in grammar and interaction by Hiroko Tanaka
  • Masataka Yamaguchi
Turn-taking in Japanese conversation: A study in grammar and interaction. By Hiroko Tanaka. Amsterdam &Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1999. Pp. xiii, 242.

This book investigates how grammar and turn-taking are part of social interaction from the perspective of conversation analysis (CA), with some comparisons made between English and Japanese, focusing on the latter. Tanaka should be especially congratulated for her collection, transcription, and detailed analysis of the recorded data. However, major problems lie in her unexamined notions of ‘language’ and little information of ‘conversation’.

After the introduction of topics and methods (Ch. 1), T reviews Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson’s 1974 model of turn-taking and the basic terms in the CA paradigm (Ch. 2). Ch. 3 is an ambitious (but tentative) attempt to quantify syntactic, prosodic, and pragmatic resources for turn-taking in Japanese, comparing the quantification of Ford and Thompson’s 1996 study of Anglo-American English. Ch. 4 argues that the canonical word order (SOV) and postpositional nature of Japanese are related to the delayed projectability of a turn compared to English. In Chs. 5 and 6, T specifically discusses relationships of particles in Japanese to transition-relevance-places (TRP). Ch. 5 deals with case and adverbial particles, and Ch. 6, with conjunctive particles, with special reference to the ‘incremental’ and ‘delayed’ nature of a turn-constructional unit in Japanese. Ch. 7 is the summary of the book.

The major findings and problems of Ch. 4 are arguably the core of the book. The functions of post-predicate additions (PPA), which make up the subject in noncanonical OVS, have been a controversial point, but T finds that the PPA is a typical locus of overlapping, thus it is a TRP and functions as a ‘recompleter’ in conversation analysis. Also, T’s incorporation of prosody into analysis, in conjunction with grammar and typical turn-taking, gives us a new perspective on the turn-taking system in Japanese, which, for example, shows how fragments are regarded as a complete unit by the Japanese interlocutors.

However, in spite of the alleged focus on ‘conversational’ grammar, the analysis does not present surprisingly ‘new’ findings. For example, T’s major argument for ‘predicate-final orientation and postpositional grammar’ in Japanese can be derived easily from the SOV word order by a purely syntactic analysis.

More seriously, her unexamined notion of language, such as ‘Japanese’ or ‘Anglo-American English’ poses serious problems; for instance, T’s statistical analysis indicates that utterance-final elements such as final suffixes are overwhelmingly used more than iikiri (truncated) forms at the ends of turns (Chs. 3 and 4). However, she does not identify social language and shows only telephone conversation or multiparty conversation, etc. Thus, we will not have answers to questions such as ‘When or to whom do people use iikiri forms more often?’ unless we take ‘social languages’ (Mikhail Bakhtin The dialogic imagination: Four essays, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981) and more contextual information into account. To understand the data better, it seems necessary to know whose ‘voices’ (Bakhtin, 1981) we are hearing, and T’s preoccupation with the formal and mechanical nature of conversation does not seem to be very promising. There is no a priori reason to assume that the identities of participants are irrelevant to the turn-taking system. [End Page 200]

Masataka Yamaguchi
University of Georgia
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