Responding With Resistance to Wh-Questions in Japanese Talk-in-Interaction

Abstract

Respondents to questions have various ways to display their stance toward the question addressed to them. This article examines the practice of deploying the negative response token iya in turn-initial position in response to wh-questions in Japanese talk-in-interaction. We show that iya-prefacing serves as an alert to the questioner that the respondent finds some aspect of the preceding question problematic. Our findings contribute to a growing body of conversation analytic research on various turn-constructional practices that are used to problematize, resist, or sidestep the constraints imposed by preceding questions across different settings and in different languages.