Fixed Expressions

Speakers in conversation do not always produce utterances smoothly. Among the various ways of deferring utterance production, this chapter focuses on three kinds of self-addressed questions (SAQs) in Japanese conversation: nan-daroo ‘what would it be,’ nan-te-yuu-no ‘what do you call it,’ and nan-da-kke ‘what was it again.’ Through quantitative analyses, we argue that the SAQs should be treated as fixed expressions for marking the epistemic stance of the speaker. We then qualitatively examine ho