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Summary Conversation Analysis 1 - Jack Sidnell, ISBN 9781405159012, LCX012X05
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WEEK 1 – TURN TAKINGChapter 3 – Turn-taking
Turns The basic units of conversation and are distributed within an ‘economy’ of opportunities to
speak.
2 widely held views on turn-taking
The turn-taking system is a characteristic of a ‘polite’ conversation, since one waits until the
other one finished their turn
Certain groups of people do not take turns in their conversation. The conversations are
contrapuntal, anarchic, disorderly, etc.
The One-at-a-Time Rule and its Exceptions
One party talking at a time (Sacks) By this, Sacks meant that the machinery of turn-taking is
organized so as to minimize both gaps in which no one is talking and overlaps in which more than
one person is talking at the same time. But there are exceptions (saying hi to a group, laughter).
Awaiting Completion: A Possible Solution?
Reason why one-party-at-a-time doesn’t work:
1) Even in the simplest situation where just two people are talking, waiting would clearly result
in the production of a gap between the end of one turn and the beginning of the next.
2) Were conversation organized this way, some kind of unambiguous “turn-completion signal”
would be required.
Grossly Apparent Facts of Conversation
The turn-taking system is:
Locally managed since it only organizes current and next turn (and not what will happen in a few
minutes or tomorrow)
Party-administered there’s no ‘referee’ to determine who should speak next and for how long.
The participants themselves work this out.
Some exceptions: interview, formal debate, classroom discussion, etc.
Constructing Turns-at-Talk
Not everything is regarded as a turn-at-talk there are some restrictions to what is hearable (=
when a turn can be seen as complete), by the participants, as a turn.
grammatical well-formedness the grammatical rules of the language used will shape what wil
and what will not count as turn-at-talk.
Example: ‘Has the park’ will not be seen as turn-at-talk since it the lack of a verb
The sequential context in which a given utterance occurs plays a decisive role in the decision in if an
utterance will count a turn. And also intonation indicates whether the turn ends or not.
,Turn-constructional units (TCU) Can be lexical, phrasal, clausal, or sentential units. These units
allow a projection of the unit-type under way, and what, roughly, it will take for an instance of that
unit-type to be completed. A single turn-at-talk may be built out of several TCU’s.
Points of Possible Completion Create Transition-Relevant Places
At the completion of each unit, transition to a next speaker may, but need not, occur. At the possible
completion of a current turn unit, transition to the next speaker is relevant.
Transition relevance place (TRP) A point of possible unit completion is a place for possible
speaker transition
Both current speakers and potential next speakers can be seen to orient to the relevance of speaker
transition at possible completion:
Speakers speakers who produce multi-unit turns can increase the pace of the talk, foreclosing the
possibility of another speaker self-selecting.
Recipients Orient to the relevance of speaker transition at possible completion by targeting just
those points as places at which to start their own turn.
We can see then that hearers monitor the syntactic, prosodic and broadly speaking pragmatic
features of the current turn to find that it is about to begin, now beginning, continuing, now coming
to completion.
They monitor talk not only to find possible points of completion but to project and anticipate
them before they actually occur.
How Turns are Distributed in Conversation
Speaker transition at such transition-relevant places is organized by a set of rules to which the
participants themselves orient:
The rules are ordered, and this ordering is crucial to the way in which they organize the distribution
of turns-at-talk. A party wishing to invoke the rule of self-selecting, it must start early to avoid the
next rule starting, namely C continuing. Furthermore, if there are more than two parties involved,
there are additional motivations for an early start since more than one potential N may target a TRP,
which is why N often start before the actual completion of a turn (e.g., at the final sounds or at a
recognition point).
,“overlap- vulnerable locations” in conversation post-positioned address terms (and tags) and
lengthened final words.
Current-selects-next technique The next speaker is selected by the current speaker (for example
an addressed question)
Self-selection The next speakers selects him/herself to speak
Current-continues Where transfer is not so effected, the current speaker may continue
Practices of Next-Speaker Selection
Sequence-initiating actions Set constraints on what should be done in a next turn (questions,
requests, complaints, etc.)
First pair parts Lead in the action that need to be done in the next pair part. This first pair part
must be combined with some kind of address, but doesn’t need to address anyone in particular and
need not select a next speaker ‘Who can tell me who wrote this poem?’
addressing can be achieved by saying someone's name, making eye contact, excluding people, or
it can be inferred from the rest of the conversation
Where the Action is: The transition Space
The turn-taking model has been criticized for being too formal and too mechanical. However, it is a
set of tools meant to be used to gain analytic leverage on any particular occasion of people talking
together, so it is not the end point of the analysis. It is like a metric a system or standard of
measurement.
A pitch peak, produced with higher pitch and greater volume than the surrounding syllables, can
signal to a recipient that the turn is going to end at the next point of possible completion.
Overlap and Interruption
Overlap is often seen as a result of not listening to each other this is not the case, however;
1) Overlap occurs only at specific times
2) Overlap is a product of rather than a violation of the system of turn-taking
3) Overlap is seen as something that can be resolved
Overlap is thus not a consequence of not listening to each other properly; on the contrary, long
stretches of overlap is a sign of order in conversation
Overlap typically occurs at transition relevance spaces.
Types of overlap:
1. Turn-terminal overlap the next speaker starts talking before the previous turn ends
Example:
A: You’re only 14 years old dar[ling
B: [I Know
2. Turn-initial overlap both speakers take the initiative to take/hold the turn, resulting in a
brief moment of overlap at the beginning of the utterance
Example:
A: The Funfair changed it [isn’t nice, isn’t it
B: [That-
3. Recognitional overlap when the expression is not yet complete, but could have been
complete and is therefore seen as such by the receiver
Example:
, A: Where did you play bas[ketball?
B: [the gym
Basketball was mentioned earlier in the conversation, so it was clear for A that it was
about basketball
4. Interruption an overlap is interruptive when it interrupts a particular action and may
contain evidence of isolation
Example:
A: Hi! My name is Naomi from conquest research, one of [Cana
B: [ No I’m sorry
An overlapped fragment of talk will be repeated so that it’s eventually produced ‘in the clear’
Repetition in this case is seen as a repair-mechanism
Points of maximal grammatical control the point at which you are clearly not finished with your
expression
you have more control here, because people know you are not finished yet and will therefore let
you speak
Repair mechanisms
- Stop talking
- Perturbations; louder volume, higher intonation, faster or slower speech
- Hiccups; sudden stops, stretching of sounds, repetition of a word
- Change in direction of vision
No repair is needed when there are;
- Continuers
- Terminal onset overlap overlap at the end of an utterance; does not need repair since the
utterance is already almost over
- Conditional access to the turn joint completion of an utterance
- Choral when several people answer a question at the same time
Aantekeningen hoorcollege
Conversation analysis (CA) An approach within the social sciences that aims to describe, analyze
and understand talk as a basic and constitutive feature of human social life.
We are interested in how people manage to talk with each other
Turn-taking
- Turns and turn-taking provide the underlying framework of conversation
- Some system for turn-taking is a requirement of any coordinated action and thus of human
society
Listed (14 things) basic things/facts in turn taking.
Basic model of the turn-taking system (Sacks, et al)
1) Turn-constructional component Units for constructing a turn: sentences, clauses, phrases,
lexical terms
2) Turn-allocational component Techniques for turn-allocation, self or other speaker
selection
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