Disfluencies We Live with in Japanese by Sadanobu, Toshiyuki;

Short description:

Sadanobu's research on fluency and disfluency in Japanese reveals that disfluency among healthy native speakers follows predictable patterns and may actually enhance their everyday communication. This is an essential book for academics and researchers on oral communication, especially in Linguistics and Japanese studies.

Long description:

Sadanobu's research on fluency and disfluency in Japanese reveals that disfluency among healthy native speakers follows predictable patterns and may actually enhance their everyday communication.

The book challenges the conventional view that disfluency should simply be eliminated by demonstrating that it serves dual purposes, both as an obstacle to overcome and a valuable communicative tool that speakers learn and strategically employ in conversation. Drawing from diverse fields including linguistics, conversation analysis, language education, and language disorders research, the contributors build a compelling case for this nuanced perspective. They extend their analysis to practical applications in second language teaching and speech synthesis, presenting disfluency as a spectrum that encompasses native speakers, language learners, and language-impaired individuals. Their findings reveal that disability-induced disfluency exists on a continuum with typical speaker disfluency rather than representing a separate phenomenon.

This is an essential book for academics and researchers on oral communication, especially in Linguistics and Japanese studies.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Table of Contents:

Part 1: "Grammar" of Disfluencies            

Chapter 1: Disfluency as a black light      

Toshiyuki SADANOBU

Chapter 2: Annotating disfluencies in spontaneous Japanese: A corpus-based study          

Takehiko MARUYAMA

Chapter 3: How can ‘incomplete’ sentences be well-formed utterances?: The conventionality of Japanese te-ending utterances             

Shigeko OKAMOTO

Chapter 4: Co-occurring connectives: A corpus study of formulaicity as spontaneously arising means to reduce disfluency in Japanese written discourse            

Andrej BEKEŠ, Bor HODOŠČEK, Kikuko NISHINA, Takeshi ABEKAWA, and Jinbo WANG    

Part 2: "Usages" of Disfluencies 

Chapter 5: Epistemicity-oriented disfluency in Japanese conversation: Disfluencies from interactional perspective             

Tomoko ENDO

Chapter 6: Disfluent sound stretch as a resource in conversational storytelling     

Satsuki ISEKI　

Chapter 7: Naturally ‘disfluent’: The repeated Japanese adverb chotto ‘a little’ in conversation     

Tsuyoshi ONO and Ryoko SUZUKI        

Part 3: "Learning/teaching" of disfluencies           

Chapter 8: Disfluency in utterances of young children     

Kenji TOMOSADA

Chapter 9: Teaching disfluency in Japanese language education and its effects on communication: A study focused on getting-stuck utterances      

Mizuki FUNAHASHI, Jun SUDO, Toshiyuki SADANOBU, and Takaaki SHOCHI

Chapter 10: Toward expressive and disfluent speech synthesis    

Akiko MOKHTARI, Hiroaki HATANO, Jun ARAI, Nick CAMPBELL, and Toshiyuki SADANOBU        

Part 4: Beyond existing fields of native/L2 learner/pathological Disfluencies         

Chapter 11: Articulatory disfluency in healthy individuals experiencing speech clumsiness             

Tatsuya KITAMURA, Yukiko NOTA, and Michiko HASHI

Chapter 12: Fluency and disfluency in language disorders              

Naohisa FURUTA, Naomi SAKAI, and Yuki TAKAKURA

Chapter 13: Between fluency and disfluency: Some considerations on the “disfluency continuum”        

Ryoko HAYASHI