An overview of the question–response system in Japanese

Based on an examination of 350 question–response pairs identified across 10 different video-taped, face-to-face interactions among native speakers of Japanese, this paper presents an overview of the question–response system in Japanese conversation. Its descriptions focus on the lexical/morphosyntactic/prosodic resources used for question formulation, the range of action types commonly performed with question-formatted utterances, the kinds of methods used for next speaker selection, and the patterns of fittedness between questions and their responses.