| This study investigates how "unknowing" story recipients (C. Goodwin, 1979) use different types of questions in order to actively participate in storytelling and collaboratively construct a story when a storyteller is relaying his or her past experience, by examining grammar, intonation, gaze, body movements, and sequence organization in Japanese conversations. During storytelling in mundane conversations, the work of unknowing story recipients is not limited to listening and providing aizuchi 'response tokens' such as un 'uh-huh.' By explicating unknowing story recipients' practice of asking storyteller questions, rather than attempting to comprehensively describe their heterogeneous practices, this study elucidates how this one practice contributes to co-constructing the activity of storytelling in different types of storytelling sequences (pre-telling, story preface, telling, and post-telling) in diverse ways not only through eliciting, repairing, forwarding, expanding, and extending stories, but also at times through disrupting the storytelling by leading the storyteller to digress from the storyline or playfully joking about the story content. Furthermore, by exploring participation in joint storytelling, where two or more co-storytellers collaboratively tell a story, this study demonstrates that unknowing story recipients monitor the interaction of the co-storytellers and shift participation frameworks by asking questions, the co-storytellers collaborate to respond to the unknowing story recipients' questions, and all of the participants achieve inclusive storytelling by exploiting various resources such as talk, gaze, and body movements. The analysis of this study contributes to the study of conversational storytelling by illuminating the processes through which participants share firsthand and secondhand experiences with members of their group, achieve mutual understanding of these events during situated talk-in-interaction, and establish interpersonal relationships by vicariously co-experiencing another's past events. It also contributes to the study of Japanese linguistics by revealing the forms, functions, and actions of Japanese questions in talk-in-interaction, and by expanding the boundary of the question beyond a single question sentence through an examination of various linguistic devices used with questions, such as turn-initial interjections and syntactic nesting. |
