Speakers advance-project turn completion by slowing down: A multifactorial corpus analysis

Abstract

Turn transition in talk-in-interaction is achieved with remarkable precision, most commonly following a gap of no more than 200 ms (e.g., Stivers et al., 2009). How the precision is achieved is a complex issue given the wide range of variables co-participants to talk-in-interaction deploy to project (as speakers) and predict (as listeners) turn completion. This paper aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of one such variable used by speakers to project turn-completion: changes in word duration in turns-at-talk. As word duration varies significantly due to influences from a large number of confounds, we approach the challenges inherent in “[p]roviding robust, quantified, comparative measures of duration” (Local & Walker, 2012: 259) by fitting mixed-effects models based on naturally occurring corpus data. Contrary to previous research, which hailed the turn-final drawl as a turn-yielding cue, the models indicate that drawling, or rallentando, affects not just the turn-final syllable/word but large portions of the turn. Rallentando appears to be, not a one-off cue marking the turn’s end-point upon its occurrence, but an extended process advance-projecting the turn’s durational envelope. Also, as a graded advance-projecting resource, rallentando is in and of itself insufficient to signal turn completion reliably; listeners are likely to rely on turn rallentando in unison with other, preferably discrete cues marking the turn-completion point upon its occurrence, for “recogniz[ing] that a turn is definitely coming to an end” (Levinson & Torreira, 2015: 12) and triggering the launch of the next turn.