Abstract
Abstract A recurrent feature of multi-party conversation is that one speaker comes in prior to the completion of another's turn and can be heard as directly competing with the other for possession of the turn. That is, the incomer can be heard as wanting the floor to himself not when the current speaker has finished but now, at this point in the conversation. Our analysis reveals that in managing talk of this kind participants, methodically produce and monitor for certain prosodic features of speech. These features, which have hitherto received scant attention in analyses of interaction, involve pitch-height, tempo and loudness variations. By deploying these prosodic features participants can constitute their incomings as competitive for the turn irrespective of the lexico-syntactic or illocutionary characteristics of their talk.
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