Unfinished turns in French conversation: Projectability, syntax and action

Abstract

This paper investigates syntactically-incomplete turns in French conversation. Despite their syntactic incompleteness, these unfinished turns are regularly treated as interactionally-complete and are responded to ‘appropriately’ with responses that show a clear understanding of the action(s) that these unfinished turns accomplished. This paper uses a conversation-analytic approach to explore how it is possible for turns to be unfinished in conversation and to examine the resources that enable unfinished turns to receive such unproblematic and appropriate responses. Data extracts from two-party telephone conversations reveal how speakers and recipients draw upon the ability of the beginning of a turn to project roughly what it may take for the turn to be completed (projectability). In turn, interactants monitor both the progressive development and the sequential placement of turns for the ways in which they contribute to the actions that these turns accomplish (action projection). The data reveal that disruption to the progressivity of unfinished turns is not random.