Embedding answers into ongoing story (and other extended) telling in conversational interaction

Abstract

Drawing from a conversation analytic investigation of Japanese speakers' face-to-face conversations and telephone calls, this study investigated a conversational device that allows speakers to stay on as tellers while answering questions. The device consists of various forms of embedding practices that make the teller's continuation of extended telling recognizable as an answer to the recipient's confirmation requests. These include the following: first, vocabulary incorporation with word replacement, in which the teller's original lexical choice is replaced with a new word used in the recipient's confirmation request; second, vocabulary incorporation without word replacement, in which the teller repeats a word (with possible syntactic modification) included in the recipient's confirmation request; and third, transformative answers, in which the teller designs their continuations with adjustments to the original question posed to them. In addition, two types of syntactic operation construct a turn-in-progress as a continuation of extended telling: repeating the same syntactic formulation of the preceding utterance of the teller and producing a syntactically continuous component of the preceding utterance. These practices enable tellers to move their extended telling forward while answering the request for confirmation, thus securing their status as tellers.