Shuya Kushida

Responding With Resistance to Wh-Questions in Japanese Talk-in-Interaction

Respondents to questions have various ways to display their stance toward the question addressed to them. This article examines the practice of deploying the negative response token iya in turn-initial position in response to wh-questions in Japanese talk-in-interaction. We show that iya-prefacing serves as an alert to the questioner that the respondent finds some aspect of the preceding question problematic. Our findings contribute to a growing body of conversation analytic research on various turn-constructional practices that are used to problematize, resist, or sidestep the constraints imposed by preceding questions across different settings and in different languages.

Using Names for Referring without Claiming Shared Knowledge: Name-Quoting Descriptors in Japanese

When a speaker refers to someone or something in talk-in-interaction, s/he may be doing more than simply referring with a reference form. This article examines a type of reference form, “name-quoting descriptor” (e.g., “person named X”), used in Japanese. I show that the name-quoting descriptor is used for claiming the referent’s “epistemic distance,” i.e., for claiming that the referent is not within the shared territory of knowledge between speaker and recipient, and thereby carries out several interactional tasks in addition to referring. This finding contributes to research on reference practices and epistemics. Data are in Japanese with English translation.