Japanese Questions presents an original, well-researched and fascinating exploration of discourse and social context. It provides fresh insights into the use of questions in Japanese through a wide range of examples and sophisticated analysis. -- Ikuko Nakane, Senior Lecturer in Japanese Studies, University of Melbourne, Australia This book presents groundbreaking new work on an unusual array of question types in contemporary Japanese -- ones that have not been previously well-explored or even included in prescriptive descriptions of Japanese grammar.
With exquisite skill, Dr Tanaka unravels the social and cultural motivations behind the use of non-canonical interrogatives such as the grammatically unfinished, the elliptical and the half questions, the latter characteristic of young people's language. Crucially, her discourse data are taken from real interaction recorded from television and telephone interviews, or during radio phone-in programmes and in conversations between friends as well as between unacquainted persons. Japanese Questions is certain to impact with force on received views about interrogativity. -- Hilary M.Chappell, Chair Professor in Linguistic Typology of East Asia, EHESS, Paris, France This wonderful study is a clear and insightful analysis of questioning strategies in Japanese, based on a substantial corpus of real data from television interviews, radio talk-back and casual conversation among friends and between strangers. Like the 2004 book by the same author, Gender Language and Culture, it uses modern discourse analysis techniques to improve our understanding of the syntactic, pragmatic and cultural factors in Japanese interaction. It develops new insights into the use of reciprocating questions, half-questions and other forms of questioning, and makes an important contribution to work in discourse analysis as well as to our knowledge of these phenomena in contemporary Japanese. -- David Bradley, Professor of Linguistics, La Trobe University, Australia
