Natsuho Iwata

This article examines several conversational practices by which people show empathy with others' experiences of extremely distressing, life-changing events. We recorded and analyzed volunteers' handling of evacuees' experiences of the 2011 Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami and the related Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster. The article demonstrates three different practices in how the volunteers reacted: formulating the troubles-teller's experience as uniquely owned, differentiating the troubles-teller's experiences from others', and invoking the volunteer's similar experiences as a basis for empathy. By orienting themselves toward the issue of who owns an experience, and which categories they can identify with, recipients do more than simply agreethey also affiliate with the speaker's stance and show their understanding of the nature of the speaker's experiences. Data are in Japanese with English translation.

This study explores the phenomenon in which a participant who is not selected as the next speaker by the current speaker starts to speak at the next turn in a triad conversation when he/she is the target of either a compliment or teasing by the current speaker, even though the speaker is addressing another participant. We consider this utterance of the unselected as a violation of the rules of the turn-taking system (Sacks, Schegloff & jefferson, 1974), and examine how it occurs and what it does in the interaction. Analysis of two cases of the data show that overlapping and sound stretch occur at the beginning of utterance of unselected participants. It is also pointed out that this practice can be explained as a demonstration by the unselected to try to block other participants from continuing with further compliments or teasing. As this phenomenon is able to be observed as a rule violation we can assume that it is conducted within the framework of the turn-taking system. This study also suggests that complimenting or teasing an unaddressed participant in a triad conversation might be used as an interactional means to explicitly involve the participant.