Temporal realization of multimodally designed enactment in Japanese talk-in-interaction

This article explores the issue of temporality and projectability regarding the production of enactments – stretches of talk designed as there-and-then verbal and/or non-verbal behaviors – in Japanese conversations. As word order is a practice that interactants employ for projecting the shape of an upcoming turn, the predicate-final structure of Japanese leads to “delayed projectability” (Fox, Hayashi & Jasperson 1996; Tanaka 1999, 2000). Japanese enactments are no exception. In English, “she said” is prototypically produced before enactment and projects a forthcoming utterance as enactment (Lerner & Takagi 1999; Schegloff 1987). In Japanese, however, syntactic markings of enactment appear after enactment and thus retrospectively indicate preceding enactment. Despite the syntactically delayed projectability, the Japanese interactants rarely exhibit difficulty in comprehending enactments. This article demonstrates that the projection of Japanese enactment is assisted by various linguistic and/or non-linguistic resources accumulated in preparation for the launch of enactment and deployed within the design of enactment.