Do continuing states of incipient talk exist?

Abstract

‘Incipient talk’, or more often ‘continuing states of incipient talk’ is an ill-defined concept that refers to some state other than talk-focused interaction. Although commonly invoked in conversation analytic and interactional linguistics research and meetings, reference to the concept is centred around a brief note in the conclusion of Schegloff and Sacks's (1973) seminal paper on closings in conversation. Their note contains neither data nor analyses and mentions only that their paper does not deal with such instances, yet it has been treated as an empirically defined phenomenon by numerous colleagues. Whilst terms may be used initially in a less technical sense, they can take on an authority of their own over time. Many authors do not even cite Schegloff and Sacks's use of the phrase. This paper aims to explicate the assumptions made in the adoption of ‘incipient talk’ by showing the range of ways in which this term are used within conversation analysis and related fields and by making explicit the contradictions of stated and/or implied reasoning within and across studies that use this term. We do so both quantitatively and through a subsequent narrative, conceptual discussion examining uses of ‘incipient talk’ in their contexts. This dual approach allows for not only identifying the patterns in which the term is used in the literature but also how individual authors relate it to their data and other terms. By approaching the issue with a focus on the ways in which the term is used in the literature, one can see the degree to which idiosyncratic uses and definitions dominate the field.We present results from a content analysis of 113 papers that use the phrase ‘incipient talk’ and show that multiple, disparate usages and definitions exist. We then discuss some of the uses and compare ‘incipient talk’ to possibly related concepts ‘open state of talk’, ‘unfocused interaction’, and ‘islands of talk’/‘Gesprächsinseln’. We provide suggestions for future research in clarifying whether ‘incipient talk’ exists and what it might be.