On 'doing friendship' in and through talk: Exploring conversational interactions of Japanese young people

The book entitled On 'doing friendship' in and through talk: Exploring conversational interactions of Japanese young peopleapproaches conversational interactions of Japanese young adults who identify as friends as the form of social interaction in and through which the co-participants manifest and accomplish their relationships, that is, as a site for ‘doing friendship’. It represents a fundamentally data-driven endeavour, drawing primarily on conversation analysis, interactional linguistics, and interactional sociolinguistics. Based on a close analysis of a set of recordings of naturally occurring conversational interactions, three broad categories of interconnected practices were identified as particularly salient and co-constitutive of the overall studied communicative activity. They in­clude: conversational humour, conversational storytelling, and relational continuity construction. The core part of this book is devoted to the exploration of the ways in which a single dyad realizes and makes use of these practices across their interactions.