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Linguistic theories tend to build their discussion on abstracted and idealized forms of language. While such idealized language can be a “pure” form for expressing logical relations and propositions, it is very different from the language we use in our everyday life. The language we actually use is often disfluent—we stumble, stretch sounds, rephrase what we have just said, and sometimes abandon speech in the middle of an utterance. This book is a rare and valuable attempt to tackle disfluency in everyday language.
 
The organization of the book is as follows: Part 1: General Overview, Part 2: Descriptive Linguistics, Part 3: Corpus Linguistics, Part 4: Conversation Analysis, Part 5: Language Education, Part 6: Language Disorders, and Part 7: Acquisition of Fluency. Each part contains two to seven papers. Parts 2 and beyond correspond to the respective subgroups of the research project, “Interdisciplinary and Empirical Study of Disfluent Speech Patterns” led by Professor Toshiyuki Sadanobu of Kyoto University. Launched in 2020, this project has been tackling the issue of language disfluency from multiple perspectives.
 
The four papers collected in Part 4 (Conversation Analysis) offer a close examination of conversational data and reveal how disfluent production of speech contributes to real-time interaction. Hayano’s paper, “Between the ‘U～n’ and ‘Un’,” discusses the ambiguity between fillers and responses. She argues that the very ambiguity between “u～n” as a filler and “un” as an affirmative response is effectively utilized as a resource by conversation participants. Yokomori’s paper, “Prosodic Variations in Final-Syllable Stretching and Their Implications for Interaction,” deals with the stretching of sounds at the end of a prosodic unit and its prosodic variations: upward-downward stretching, characterized by a prominent rise and fall in pitch, and simple stretching, involving a gradual downward pitch without such fluctuations. The author claims that these prosodic differences are linked to differences in the construction of interactional units. Kuroshima’s paper, “Disfluency and Preference Organization in Requests in Service Encounters,” examines the disfluent nature of requests in service encounters. The author argues that the segmentation of requests by service providers is a practical means of realizing behaviors based on the rights and obligations of giving and receiving services. Endo’s paper, “The Responsiveness of Self-Directed Questions,” focuses on self-directed questions. In Japanese conversations, self-directed questions such as “nani” (‘What?’), “nandarou” (‘I wonder...?’), “nante iu no” (‘What do you call it?’), and “nandakke” (‘What was it?’) are often used as fillers. By conducting a detailed analysis of the production of self-directed questions, including body movements and the orientation of participants to their cognitive stances, the author examines how self-directed questions mobilize, or do not mobilize, response from recipients.
 
Fluency, while often celebrated, is not the only measure of effective language use. As this edited volume demonstrates, disfluency plays a vital role and deserves greater attention in linguistic research.
 

(Written by ENDO Tomoko, Associate Professor, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences / 2024)