Designed ‘to be’ or ‘not to be’ complete? The status of the –te form in Japanese syntax for conversation

Abstract

According to the conversation analytic model of turn taking, the essential element for turn organization is the recognition of a turn at talk as being possibly complete – at possible completions speaker change becomes a relevant next action. This paper will examine a corpus of naturally occurring Japanese language conversations collected from 20 recordings of casual conversations between 50 native speakers of Japanese recorded in Tokyo in 2007. It will argue that the –te form is an incomplete turn construction unit (TCU), but that it is designed to be incomplete and that there are action motivations for such a design. The incompleteness of –te forms is therefore not a problem of turn construction but an interactionally relevant.