Projection refers to the feature of human conduct that prefigures possible trajectories of how an action (or a sequence of actions) might develop in the next moment. This feature allows interactants to negotiate and accomplish coordinated action in the subsequent course of interaction. This study explores the mechanism of projection with a focus on the relationship between projection and grammar. To that end, it examines a particular turn-constructional practice involving the 'action-projecting' use of the distal demonstrative pronoun are in Japanese. The point of departure for this study is the observation made by previous research that, due to some typological features of Japanese grammar, the projection of unfolding turn-shape and action-type is achieved relatively late in the course of a turn in Japanese. Through a detailed examination of relevant data from naturally-occurring Japanese talk-in-interaction, this study shows that Japanese speakers can nonetheless achieve early projection of forthcoming action through the use of the turn-constructional practice involving 'action-projecting' are and thereby compensate for delayed projectability.

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This study examines the use of a so-called "cleft construction" in talk-in-interaction. While this construction is believed to take the form of "[clause] no wa, [clause] koto da," spontaneous interactional data often include cases in which the -no wa clause is not followed by a corresponding clause marked by a nominalizer. Instead, the ending of the talk initiated with the -no wa clause seems to be marked by repetition of the same or proximate predicated used in the -no wa clause. The current analysis of two excerpts of interaction reveals how -no wa clauses in these cases acts as "preliminaries to preliminaries" (Schegloff, 1980), which enable the speaker to create space to convey background information critical to the projected delivery of his or her view point. The study also refers to how conversational participants coordinate grammar and other nonverbal resources in constructing and understanding their turns at talk.

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Various functions and meanings of the Japanese particle ne have been proposed in previous studies. This paper examines how the particle ne is deployed in conversation as a resource for constructing participation frameworks by explicitly indicating the issue of "alignment" for local problems of contingency. Here I argue that the issue of alignment are the most fundamental issue in orderliness that participants in conversation must orient to. Analyzing naturally occurring conversational data, I show how practices of explicit display of concern in terms of situated alignment may give rise to ideology-laden socio-pragmatic interpretations, such as those of "politeness," "overfriendliness," "affective common ground" and "femininity."

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The author analyzes data extracted from a single case of a psychotherapy session, in which the counselor frequently uses both hai and un as recipient response tokens. Focusing on the counselor's use of hai during the client's talk-at-turn, the author shows hai is used not to index politeness or some cognitive change in the counselor's mind, but to demonstrate the counselor's understanding that the client's unfolding turn has come to a focal point of interaction, where the client is recognizably oriented to the possibility of interactional trouble that may hamper the counselor's alignment, understanding or recognition. A similar case from ordinary conversation is also introduced, and the possibility of using the findings of the single therapy session to investigate similar cases in other interactional settings is proposed.

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This study attempts to reconsider "argument ellipsis", or "zero-anaphora", from the perspective of interaction. Japanese language is said to be highly elliptical, with many utterance elements left unexpressed. But does such ellipsis actually matter to participants? By examining some cases of "other-initiated repair", this study identifies utterances which participants themselves treat as elliptical and therefore troublesome. There is a particular form of repair which is designed to prompt a prior speaker to provide an utterance element found "missing" from the trouble-source turn. For participants, ellipsis is not merely a grammatical issue: they orient to, and deal with, unexpressed utterance elements because they are relevant to interactional tasks of accomplishing actions through talk. The practice of repair works as a sort of "back-up" device which enlarges the usability of Japanese grammatical resources in conversation.

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The aim of this article is to describe the orderliness of a piece of talk that appears to be disorganized. Parties are oriented to turn-constructional completeness and expressional completeness in constructing their talk in conversation. I note, however, that a specific place, a response-opportunity place, at which the ongoing talk is still both turn-constructionally and expressionally incomplete, turns out to be interactionally significant. The complexity of the piece of talk can be described as a result of solutions of some possible interactional problems at response-opportunity places. In the concluding section, I also explicate an interactional import of expressional completeness.

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In initially referring to something in a conversation, a speaker sometimes initiates a recognition search before using a reference term in an action. When such a search is initiated, participants have to manage two potentially competing tasks, that of cooperating in a recognition search activity and that of securing progressivity of an ongoing utterance or sequence. In this paper, I will first describe three procedures which referrers use to initiate a recognition search in Japanese conversation: try-marked recognitionals, request for recognition and inquiry into knowledge. I will then show that each procedure proposes a different type of management of the two potentially competing tasks.

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Although Japanese conversational interaction has often been described as telepathic and implicit, relatively little empirical research exists concerning the mechanisms behind allusive exchanges. This article employs conversation analysis to explore strategies for studying such phenomena, by investigating how allusive utterances are produced, understood, and treated, in interactional environments where speakers mark their emerging talk as 'delicate'. In response to an allusive utterance, a hearer may, for instance, reply in a similarly allusive manner while simultaneously displaying an understanding of what is being conveyed by the speaker, or alternatively, refuse to accept the speaker's utterance in its allusive form, just to mention two out of an entire range of possible trajectories. By examining how such instances unfold, I argue that the achievement of allusive interaction is by no means straightforward, but is a joint achievement contingent on a fine calibration of the participants' mutual orientations.

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This study explores the phenomenon in which a participant who is not selected as the next speaker by the current speaker starts to speak at the next turn in a triad conversation when he/she is the target of either a compliment or teasing by the current speaker, even though the speaker is addressing another participant. We consider this utterance of the unselected as a violation of the rules of the turn-taking system (Sacks, Schegloff & jefferson, 1974), and examine how it occurs and what it does in the interaction. Analysis of two cases of the data show that overlapping and sound stretch occur at the beginning of utterance of unselected participants. It is also pointed out that this practice can be explained as a demonstration by the unselected to try to block other participants from continuing with further compliments or teasing. As this phenomenon is able to be observed as a rule violation we can assume that it is conducted within the framework of the turn-taking system. This study also suggests that complimenting or teasing an unaddressed participant in a triad conversation might be used as an interactional means to explicitly involve the participant.

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This paper describes the procedure of a given conversation pattern. This procedure is initiated by a question to which a response is received. On receiving the response, the questioner then goes on to talk as he/she wishes in relation to the question. We refer to this type of question as a 'clue question.' The respondent recognizes from the clue question that the person posing the question is troubled in relation to the question and would like to talk this trouble. In this procedure, being able to talk in relation to the question depends upon the respondent recognizing the clue question.

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This paper examines repair sequences that involve the use of Katakana English (loan words and English words pronounced with Japanese pronunciation) in Japanese conversation between first language speakers and second language speakers, and discusses how identities such as "first language speaker" and "second language speaker" are oriented to by participants in the interaction. I first introduce how identities are viewed from a conversation analytic perspective and then analyze the present data. The data reveals that how Katakana English is pronounced is related to order in Japanese conversation, and that how it is pronounced may occasionally create interactional problems in conversation between first language speakers and second language speakers. The participants treat identities such as "first language speaker," and "second language speaker" as relevant in the repair sequences to deal with these interactional problems.

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In this article, I concentrated on the Nazi doctors who committed crimes against their patients in the name of medical care and attempted to examine the ideology which characterized that society by analyzing their discourses linguistically. Firstly, I discribed the formation process of the social context that was important for discourse analysis in terms of eugenics, nationalism, and totalitarianism. Secondly, I interpreted the discourses of the doctors of the Third Reich from various angles to identify their members' resource. In conclusion they seemed to have had several members' resource mixed together: eugenics, nationalism, and totalitarianism. In addition, members' resource in the medical circle of the Third Reich had shaded into ideology through their discourse. And once the medical crimes had occurred, their ideology had urged to do it with Nazi rhetoric that hide the nature of the crimes and the aspect of anti-humanism until the end of the WW II.

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