Disfluencies We Live with in Japanese

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.

Toshiyuki Sadanobu is Professor at Graduate School of Letters, Kyoto University, Japan.

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 BEKEs, Bor HODOsCEK, 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