Collaborative construction of talk in Japanese conversation

Conversation is an intricately coordinated interactional choreography achieved by multiple participants through talk and other conduct. Participants manage the rich and continuous flow of information to assemble, parse, and project emerging actions. Conversation Analysis (CA) understands talk as a series of turns that are built out of "turn-constructional unit (TCU)" (Sacks et al. 1974). These units can constitute possibly complete turns, and on their possible completion, transition to a next speaker becomes relevant at a "transition-relevant place (TRP)." TCUs are interactionally-relevant units, emerging in response to local contingencies within the temporally unfolding talk. Through empirical studies of Japanese conversation, I identify occasions where speakers halt production of their TCU and hearers participate before the speakers reach completion. The segmental production of TCUs found in Japanese facilitates permeability of units, which suggests that interaction can also occur within a TCU. This requires a finer-grained analysis of intricately coordinated engagement structures. Shifting focus to consider the segmented sub-unit components and interactional contingencies, this dissertation analyzes participation lodged within the turn-taking organization. Conducting micro-analyses of Japanese conversation, I re-conceptualize units of talk as multi-dimensional collaborative production through talk and a constellation of embodied actions.;Based on an investigation of units in Japanese, application of turn organization at the scale of sub-components, and consideration of recipient actions, I develop an analytical framework to explain how the internal structure of a TCU in a turn at talk, in combination with the utilization of linguistic and nonlinguistic resources, facilitates collaborative participation in conversation. I introduce the notion of interactive turn spaces and examine the multimodal mechanics of speaker-initiation of these spaces and their interactional imports.;Interactive turn spaces can be either speaker initiated or recipient initiated. This study focuses primarily on speaker initiation, where the speaker of the unit-in-progress invites the other party to join in and co-participate displaying heightened attention, affiliation, and alignment; and thus, the recipients are not simply addressees, but they monitor and collaborate to construct the emerging talk in progress and display various stances through vocal and visible actions. Explicating where and how the speaker projects and provides spaces, how the space is anticipated and recognized, and the impacts of reflexivity reveals the multimodal architecture of building action together.;This study of interaction in Japanese contributes to expanding Conversation Analytic research on TCU production and burgeoning research on multimodality. In addition, through the investigation of emerging sub-unit components, it repositions recipient actions and challenges common conceptions of aizuchi by examining speaker's action and hearer's action as a coordinated whole. The findings reinforce the collaborative and embodied nature of talk-in-interaction.