Collaboratively organized stancetaking in Japanese: Sharing and negotiating stance within the turn constructional unit

• The paper advances understanding of stancetaking in Japanese.
• Stancetaking is a collaborative and interactive activity that is jointly engaged.
• Speakers use multimodal resources to create spaces to negotiate stance within TCUs.
• Talk can be suspended and turn-final components delayed for stance negotiation.
• TCU construction can be shaped to achieve alignment among participants.

Stancetaking is one of the fundamental properties of human interaction (cf. Du Bois and Kärkkäinen, 2012, Englebretson, 2007b, Goodwin, 2007, Goodwin and Goodwin, 1992, Goodwin and Goodwin, 2004 and Jaffe, 2009). It is pervasive, intersubjective, and collaborative, emerging in response to local contingencies in interaction. While a number of studies have investigated stance in English, little has been done in Japanese. Using Conversation Analysis (CA) frameworks, this paper explores how participants in Japanese conversation employ, or exploit, linguistic and multimodal resources to create opportunities for stance negotiation within the formulation of a turn in progress through strategically suspending the progressivity of a “turn-constructional unit (TCU)” (Sacks et al., 1974 and Schegloff, 1996). Rather than treating stance as a static category relating to the speaker, this study views stancetaking as a dynamic, emergent and interactive characteristic of language in social interaction. In this paper stancetaking is conceptualized through the social interactional processes of alignment and affiliation among participants and viewed as an embodied interactive activity.