DiSS-LPSS Joint Workshop 2010 The 5th Workshop on Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech The 2nd International Symposium on Linguistic Patterns in Spontaneous Speech Tokyo, Japan, September 25-26, 2010

Salientizing the Breaks in Talk: A Study of Japanese Segmentizing

Emi Morita

Department of Japanese Studies, National University of Singapore, Singapore

In naturally occurring conversation, Japanese speakers often break up their turns at talk with seemingly random or disfluent pauses that break the flow of talk into a series of successive small segments which may not be semantically coherent. Moreover, the boundaries between such segments are often made salient via the attachment of interactional particles, such as ne and sa. Empirical observation of such naturally occurring partitioning of talk reveals that such “semantically irregular” segmentation is used by both speakers and their recipients to accomplish a legitimate communicative function in managing the fine-tuned choreography of moment-bymoment conversational interaction.

Index Terms. utterance segmentation, interactional particles, Japanese conversation

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Morita, Emi (2010): "Salientizing the breaks in talk: a study of Japanese segmentizing", In DiSS-LPSS-2010, 59-62.