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Part of
Pragmatics of Japanese: Perspectives on grammar, interaction and culture
Edited by Mutsuko Endo Hudson, Yoshiko Matsumoto and Junko Mori
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 285] 2018
► pp. 99–122

Chapter 4
“Late projectability” of Japanese turns revisited

Interrelation between gaze and syntax in Japanese conversations

| Tamkang University

Examining an interrelation between gaze and syntax in Japanese interaction, this study reveals the tendency that a speaker’s gaze shift to a recipient occurs in association with the final predicate of the turn-constructional unit (TCU), regardless of the grammatical form of the component following the predicate. The finding proposes that a speaker’s gaze projects an imminent onset of transition space in which a recipient may begin a next turn without being regarded as an interruption. While past studies highlighted the interactional significance of the utterance-final elements that “retroactively” mark the immediately preceding verb/adjective/nominal as the TCU-final predicate, this study uncovers that a speaker’s mid-TCU gaze shift serves as another resource to “proactively” mark the upcoming predicate as a TCU-final one.

Keywords: speaker’s gaze, TCU-final predicate, turn projection, late projectability, transition space, Conversation Analysis, interaction, Japanese, pragmatics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1Late projectability of Japanese TCUs
    • 2.2The role of gaze in social interaction
  • 3.Data
  • 4. Analysis: The timing of gaze shift with orientation to the “final” predicate
  • 5.Discussion: What does the speaker’s mid-TCU gaze signal in terms of TCU/turn projection?
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Appendix
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 16 April 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.285.04nak
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