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Paper short abstract

Through the analysis of actual talk, focusing on the design, sequential placement, and functions of direct speech constructions in Japanese conversational interactions, the paper explains what makes their use such a popular and powerful resource for affective stance display in Japanese.

Paper long abstract

In the course of informal conversational interactions, Japanese speakers readily transition into direct speech and back, using a range of direct speech constructions that allow them to enact not only their own and other people’s past utterances, but also imagined speech, thoughts, emotions, and attitudes attributed to the self as well as others. By using direct speech, speakers ‘show’ rather than ‘tell’ their co-participants what happened, might (have) happen(ed), happens, is happening, or what they think will happen, while simultaneously position their co-participants as an interpreting audience to the enactments, tasked with picking up on the affective stances that the speakers thereby display, making use of all semiotic resources.

In this paper, we will consider the speakers’ use of direct speech constructions in the process of recounting past events. Using extracts from actual conversational interactions, we will examine the formats that direct speech constructions in Japanese conversational interactions may take as well as their sequential placement, actions they are used to perform, and effects they have on the ongoing interaction. Through the analysis, we will uncover and describe the major characteristics that make direct speech constructions such a useful and popular resource for affective stance display in Japanese.

The theoretical and methodological framework this study adopts is anchored in Interactional Linguistics. The paper is based on the analysis of the author’s own collection of recordings of spontaneous face-to-face conversational interactions between Japanese young adult friends, various everyday conversations from the Corpus of Everyday Japanese Conversations (CEJS), and telephone conversations from the TalkBank Japanese CallFriend and CallHome corpora.