2023 Volume 26 Issue 1 Pages 228-243
In question-answer sequences of multi-party conversations in Japanese, the answerer often solicits a third party’s intervention. A third-party participant is someone who is present during the conversation but has not been selected as the next speaker by the questioner. This paper describes third-party participant intervention methods in question-answer sequences, using videotaped group discussions between Japanese and international university students. Question-answer sequences that began with questions about a country’s situation were collected for the research. Careful analysis revealed that while an answerer produces their answer, they seek a third-party’s intervention in the middle of the turn construction, using resources like gaze shift, distributed knowledge among participants, and the projectability of a turn construction unit. As a result, three types of third-party participant interventions were observed: a mere approval of an answer being produced, a continuation of a syntactic unit begun by the answerer, and the production of an independent answer. Furthermore, by soliciting a third-party intervention, answerers were seen to produce a collective-level answer on a country’s situation, which demonstrated shared knowledge among participants. Interculturality was observed to be locally achieved in the sequences.
