This chapter addresses the paucity of research on parliamentary discourse in Japan by examining questions used in The House of Representatives Plenary Meetings (2014–2017). This study looks at grammatical, functional and turn-taking aspects to explore Japanese politicians’ questioning strategies… read more
Unlike the short and specific advice of service-encounters, advice in counselling settings is longer and more complex. In these interactions, it is known that advice is initially resisted in all languages. Scholars have tried to explain this phenomenon in terms of ‘face loss’ (Brown and Levinson… read more
The use of particular lexical, semantic and pragmatic elements to determine the degree of formality is well recognised. In Japanese, formality in a communicative interaction is achieved not only by the use of the appropriate speech style but also of backchannels and short responses. Three such… read more
Despite interviewers having a wide range of strategies to elicit talk, English language interviewers overwhelmingly use syntactic questions. In contrast, most turns in Japanese semi-formal television interviews end in non-interrogative forms, and other methods are used to achieve smooth turn… read more