The papers in this panel address the question of how speech acts/functions such as question-answer are constructed through a multiple of utterances/sentences, focusing on the overall structure of Japanese spoken and written discourse. Each paper deals with a discourse that can be viewed as an adjacency pair expansion; invitations-responses, presenting-receiving information, asking-giving advice, yes/no questions-answers, alternate questions-opinions.
The first paper gives an overview of utterance expansions, and demonstrates how the overall structure of dyadic invitations, casual conversation and animation storytellings relates to the goal of the conversation, and is made up of co-constructed sections with distinctive utterance distribution patterns. The second paper analyzes the overall structure of radio programs in which doctors give medical/psychological advice. Participants are shown to co-construct each part of the advice section (confirmation of the problem, the answer, and answer-confirmation) using different utterance functions. The third paper demonstrates that question-answer medical newspaper columns are structured in such a way that the direct answers to yes/no questions in these columns come in the middle or end of the answer section after an explanation of key terms. This contrasts with Japanese textbooks in which the yes/no answer typically follows directly after the question. The fourth paper, reports on a survey of opinion compositions written in response to an alternative question, and shows that Japanese writers give their opinion 1) in both the beginning and the end, 2) only in the end, or 3) only in the beginning, in that order, and vary in their use of the connectives mazu 'first' and tugi ni 'next.'
The papers in this panel demonstrate that so-called "adjacency pairs" in Japanese spoken/written discourse have an organization that goes beyond single Q-A utterances/sentences, and point to the need to teach the overall structure of spoken/written discourse to Japanese learners.