Transition Relevance Place Research Articles

The particle ne as a turn-management device in Japanese conversation

This paper is a study of the Japanese final particle ne from the perspective of conversation analysis. It is shown that ne acts as a pivotal device employed by participants for turn-management and topic-management in naturally-occurring conversational interaction. This particle is occasioned in four different positions within a turn: turn-initial, turn-internal, turn-final locations, as well as occupying an entire turn. In each case, it can be employed to regulate speakership and listenership among participants, but its occurrence in these positions is respectively associated with distinct types of turn-taking operations: to mark turn-entry points, acknowledgement-relevance places, possible transition-relevance places, and topic changes. Furthermore, ne can also be featured in the performance of a wide range of other practices, depending on its positioning and the immediate sequential context: e.g. summoning, repair initiation, displaying affiliation, collaborative construction of talk, competing for the floor, inviting affiliation, and reconfirming an agreed point. In sum, the particle ne is an extremely versatile tool contingently mobilised by speakers for diverse interactional activities and for the achievement of intersubjectivity.

Turn Projection in Japanese Talk-in-Interaction

In this article I explore the interactional significance of grammar on turn-taking in Japanese in view of reported conversation analytic findings on turn-taking for Anglo-American English. In particular, I examine ways in which grammar may be implicated in the construction of turns at speaking and the projection of turn endings in Japanese talk-in-interaction. In a crude sense, the grammatical structures of Japanese and English can be regarded as polar opposites. This is reflected in dramatic differences in participant orientations to turn construction and projection in the respective languages. Specifically, in contrast to English grammar, which massively enables early projectability of the social action that might occupy a turn, the grammatical structure of Japanese permits incremental transformability of a turn in progress and overwhelmingly results in a later arrival of the point at which the emerging shape of a turn can be known. This delayed projectability in Japanese, however, is to a large extent compensated by a potentially greater degree of certitude with which participants can localize turn endings through devices that mark possible transition-relevance places.

Prosody as an interactional resource: turn-projection and overlap.

One aim of current research into talk-in-interaction is to identify the resources that enable recipients to monitor the course of a turn in progress in order to project its upcoming completion. This issue is addressed through analysis of instances of overlapping talk, focusing on their design--that is, their particular prosodic and other linguistic characteristics; their placement--in other words, where precisely they occur in relation to the turn being overlapped; and the subsequent behavior of the coparticipants. Phonetic analysis is combined with interactional techniques developed within Conversation Analysis, to warrant the relevance of categories by reference to the behavior of the participants themselves. As French and Local (1983) found, for an incoming to be treated as turn-competitive, it has to be designed with relatively high pitch and loud volume. These turn-competitive incomings are positioned within the turn in progress, and before the final major accent. By contrast, overlapping incomings positioned after the major accent are not designed as or treated as turn-competitive. On the basis of this analysis, we can define transition relevance place (TRP) as the space between the TRP-projecting accent of the current turn and the onset of the next turn. TRP-projecting accents are identifiable on independent grounds, being phonetically distinct from non-TRP-projecting accents. They thus provide a robust resource for participants to monitor the upcoming completion of the turn.

Evaluation of interruption behavior by naive encoders

The purpose of this study was to determine the characteristics of interactions that influence judgments of interruption behavior in naive observers. We selected 40 potential interruption conversation segments from television political talk shows. These segments were coded for the following 8 features a priori: floor change, rapport, transition‐relevance place (TRP), topic change, number of syllables overlap, line of regard, gender of interrupter, and gender of speaker, as well as 3 exploratory variables of overlap pile‐up, interruption acknowledgment, and moderator process‐relevant speech. The a priori features were chosen because in previous studies researchers had identified them as theoretically important in characterizing interruptions. Participants were asked to decide whether an example was indeed an interruption and then to rate it in terms of how “good” or “bad” it was as an example of an interruption, in order to extract a prototypicality judgment. Our findings suggest that a hybrid definition, combining the theoretical variables TRP, overlap (West & Zimmerman, 1977), rapport, and topic change (Goldberg, 1990), and the exploratory variables interruption acknowledgment and overlap pile‐up, best represents naive encoders’ views of interruption behavior.

Interruption revisited: Affiliative vs. disaffiliative intervention

Following the Sacks et al. (1974) model of conversation which defines simultaneity as violation, a number of researchers (Zimmerman and West, 1975; West and Zimmerman, 1983; Murray and Covelli, 1988; Leet-Pellegrini, 1980) have quantitatively investigated the interrupting habits of women and men - which they have found to differ dramatically - solely in terms of distance from projected transition-relevance place. This paper re-defines simultaneity in terms of its function from the point of view of ‘face’/ ‘preference’, i.e. in light of its execution as affiliative or disaffiliative intervention, and relates it to gender. Within this frame which combines ethomethodological Conversation Analysis with the ‘face’-based strategy model (Brown and Levinson, 1987), affiliative intervention is instantiated as addressee-oriented face-saving strategies, preferred second pair parts of adjacency pairs, genuine repair, ratifying back-channel responses, initiation/development of affiliative topics and affiliative topic change/shift, etc. Disaffiliative intervention, i.e. interruption, on the other hand, consists in the antagonistic performance of all the above. On this basis, the two sexes, who otherwise display comparable outputs of simultaneous speech, emerge as having differing perceptions of intrusion into alter's space: for women it is overwhelmingly a tool of support, agreement, ratification, whereas men use it indiscriminately either in support for or dissent from current speaker/topic, although in either case they tend to direct it mainly towards their female interlocutors.

A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation

Publisher Summary Turn taking is used for the ordering of moves in games, for allocating political office, for regulating traffic at intersections, for the servicing of customers at business establishments, and for talking in interviews, meetings, debates, ceremonies, conversations. This chapter discusses the turn-taking system for conversation. On the basis of research using audio recordings of naturally occurring conversations, the chapter highlights the organization of turn taking for conversation and extracts some of the interest that organization has. The turn-taking system for conversation can be described in terms of two components and a set of rules. These two components are turn-constructional component and turn-constructional component. Turn-allocational techniques are distributed into two groups: (1) those in which next turn is allocated by current speaker selecting a next speaker and (2) those in which next turn is allocated by self-selection. The turn-taking rule-set provides for the localization of gap and overlap possibilities at transition-relevance places and their immediate environment, cleansing the rest of a turn's space of systematic bases for their possibility.