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Article published In: Pragmatics
Vol. 16:2/3 (2006) ► pp.361–398

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Turn-taking in Japanese television interviews

A study on interviewers’ strategies

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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 1 June 2006
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https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.16.2-3.05tan
Despite interviewers having a wide range of strategies to elicit talk, English language interviewers overwhelmingly use syntactic questions. In contrast, most turns in Japanese semi-formal television interviews end in non-interrogative forms, and other methods are used to achieve smooth turn yielding. This study looks at the interviewers’ turns and examines how interviewees recognize turn-yielding. It argues that interviewers prefer using interviewing strategies other than canonical question forms to avoid any possible FTA (face threatening act).
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