Japanese Multiple Saying Iya Iya Iya as a Practice of Managing Persistence in Interaction

This study examines the Japanese multiple saying iya iya iya. Iya is a Japanese negation token often translated as “no” in English. While an increasing number of cross-linguistic studies have begun to explore the social actions that multiple sayings perform, multiple sayings have, as yet, received much less attention in Japanese. By exploring the use of the multiple iya in two different sequential environments—that is, advice-giving sequences and opinion-negotiation sequences—the present research argues that the use of the multiple iya is an interactional practice of managing interactants’ persistence in assumption, understanding, and stance. By documenting the interactional workings of the multiple iya, this study aims to contribute to the growing body of research on multiple sayings as well as on response tokens in general. Data are in Japanese.