Questioning and Answering Practices across Contexts and Cultures

The aim of this investigation is to examine the relationship between information-eliciting questions and their corresponding answers that occur in first encounters between male interlocutors in a Japanese semi-formal academic context. This topic acquires a special significance in the context of Japanese culture, where asking questions is regarded as dispreferred verbal behavior. Five types of constraints on initiating question-based conversations in a Japanese social-cultural context have been i