Turn-constructional Units Research Articles

An action-specific examination of the role of answerers’ gaze orientation in managing transition relevance

ABSTRACT We use conversation analysis to both qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrate that, in a specific action context, an answerer’s gaze orientation at the end of their answer’s first verbal turn-constructional unit (TCU) is one cooperating element of a multi-resource gestalt for managing the answer-turn’s transition relevance. Specifically, gazing at (vs. away from) a questioner claims that the initial TCU is (or is not yet) transition-relevant. Findings suggest that an additional resource is prior context in the form of the amount of delay (in milliseconds) of an answer relative to its question. Other potential resources, such as the TCU’s type conformity generally and its specific status as a “Yes”- or “No”-type answer, were not associated with transition relevance. Data are 274 polar, question–answer sequences—representing the very delimited social action of relatively genuine information-seeking—drawn from videotapes of completely unstructured, face-to-face interactions between dyads of native English-speaking, adult close friends.

« Sarà primavera dai ». L’uso della particella dai in italiano e in dialetto trevigiano

This conversation analytic study aims to describe the actions performed by speakers of Italian and Trevigiano – a northern Italian dialect – by using the particle dai in everyday conversations. Our analyses draw on a corpus of formal and informal phone calls, where dai appears as preface and at the end of turns that initiate new courses of action, at the end of some responsive turns (or Turn-Constructional Units) and in post-expansions (that is, turns in third position). The actions embodied by these turns – requests, proposals and assessments – have in common the momentary deontic imbalance in favor of the speaker, who tells, asks or proposes to the coparticipant to do something. The particle also accompanies assessments of events to which the speaker has no direct experience (thus from an epistemically subordinate position). This study highlights the fuzziness of the boundaries between deontic and epistemic rights in everyday talk.

Audible Inhalation as a Practice for Mitigating Systemic Turn-Taking Troubles: A Conjecture

ABSTRACT Extending Jefferson’s analysis of the limited utility of turn-constructional-unit (TCU)-initial particles in managing overlapping talk, this article limits itself to a similar turn-taking context/position in which current speakers bring TCUs to places of possible completion when it is relevant for next speakers to take a turn of talk. This article examines situations in which current speakers continue to audibly inhale in the transition space, arguing that inhalations (a) are pre-beginning actions; (b) bestow a weaker right to speak next than does talk; (c) are not accountable for obscuring next speakers’ talk (if it eventuates); (d) allow for beginning TCUs while monitoring for next speakers’ talk, thereby allowing inhalers to proceed contingently based on next speakers’ unfolding conduct; and (e) are used to mitigate the systemic turn-taking troubles of “no person speaking at a time” and “more than one person speaking at a time.” Data are videotapes of mundane, dyadic, American English conversation.

TURN-TAKING IN "THE LAND OF FIVE TOWERS" NOVEL: IMPLICATIONS FOR THE TEACHING OF PRAGMATICS

The discouraging level of students’ literacy in Indonesia has encouraged teachers to look for alternatives in teaching, leading to the use of various teaching media to help increase students’ literacy. This study explores the use of novels, a genre of authentic text with interesting and inspirational contents, to help students understand pragmatics and thorough description of the turn-takings and their components in the novels. The method used is turn-taking analysis with two data taken, namely conversations for turn-taking features and narration by the author as turn constructional units. From the data collected, this research uses the conversation analysis method that was initiated by Sack, Schegolff, and Jefferson. The turn-taking feature found in this study is turn-taking in groups of students or when they listen to lectures from the teacher. The narrative section from the writer was used to show how the gaps, overlapping, intonation, or actions of the characters are. This part gave a big limitation to explore because it depends on what the writer wrote in narration. The genre of this novel also will influence what the researcher will find and English students will learn in pragmatics.

The Bias Toward Single-Unit Turns in Conversation

ABSTRACT Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson argued that the rules for turn taking for conversation involve a confluence of pressures that bias turn size toward single turn constructional units (TCUs), which leads to an empirical prediction that turns are more likely to be composed of single (vs. multiple) TCUs. We directly test and confirm this “single-TCU bias” by using conversation analysis, corpus linguistics, and Bayesian statistics to assess the conversational subcorpus of the British National Corpus (BNC-C), which contains 475,509 turns of talk. Our results confirm this bias, showing that 67% of turns are composed of single TCUs; we discuss why this estimate is conservative. The mean word length for single-TCU turns was 4.5 (SD = 3.4), compared to 19.9 (SD = 22.6) for multi-TCU turns. Our findings reinforce the ideas that the natural habitat for an accountable social action is the single TCU (vs. the turn), and that interaction is fundamentally organized (i.e., both produced and understood) on an action-by-action basis, which is a TCU-by-TCU basis. Data are in British English.

How grammar grows out of social interaction: From multi-unit to single-unit question

AbstractThis article scrutinizes interactional motivations for the sedimentation of grammatical usage patterns. It investigates how multi-unit questioning turns may have routinized into a single-unit social action format. Multimodal sequential analysis of French conversational data identifies a recurrent pattern in which a question-word question is followed by a candidate answer (formally: [question-word question + phrase/clause]). The data show a continuum of synchronic usage, the pattern being implemented as either two or one turn-constructional unit(s), with intermediate cases displaying fuzzy boundaries. In usage (i), a candidate answer emerges in response to the recipient’s lack of uptake as a way of pursuing response; in (ii) the candidate answer occurs immediately after the question, with fuzzy prosodic boundaries between the two units; in (iii) the pattern is produced as a single turn-constructional unit, showing important lexico-syntactic and prosodic consistency. It is argued that the integrated format (iii) originates in the repeated interactional sequencing of two subsequent actions, as in (i), and serves as a resource for proffering a highly tentative guess: It is the routinized product of frequent combinations in use, emerging from the interactionally motivated two-unit format. The findings support an understanding of interaction as a driving force for the routinization of patterns of language use.

OH + OKAY in informing sequences: On fuzzy boundaries in a particle combination

AbstractThis study explores fuzzy boundaries, or weak cesuras, in the particle combination OH + OKAY as used in informing sequences in ordinary English talk-in-interaction. The focus is on the third position in such sequences, where OH + OKAY responds to information that has been solicited by the speaker in a prior turn. Based on a collection of approximately 45 instances of OH + OKAY in recent American English telephone and face-to-face interactions, this study adopts the methodology of Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics to examine the prosody and phonetics of OH + OKAY as a feature of turn design. It asks: (i) when does the speaker use a combination of OH and OKAY in the third position rather than a simple OH or OKAY? and (ii) to what extent does the prosodic–phonetic delivery of OH + OKAY contribute to an interpretation of what the turn is doing? The study finds that (i) OH + OKAY is used when responding to a solicited informing that not only supplies information but also accomplishes another action with consequences for the recipient and (ii) if OH + OKAY is delivered with a strong cesura between its parts, its actions are distributed in separate turn-constructional units, creating a multi-unit turn that proposes sequence closure. If the cesura in OH + OKAY is weak, the component parts are fused into a compound particle that can preface more talk by the same speaker. Weak boundaries between OH and OKAY can be exploited by participants for the purposes of turn construction and epistemic positioning.

The Korean discourse particle ya across multiple turn positions: An interactional resource for turn-taking and stance-taking

This paper investigates the Korean vocative interjection ya ‘hey’ in multiple turn-constructional unit (TCU) positions. A conversation analytic examination of telephone and face-to-face conversations shows that ya is an emerging discourse particle that plays an important role in the organization of turn-taking and stance-taking. At TCU-initial position speakers regularly use ya when departing from one topic to another or from one action/activity to another in a disjunctive manner. Here, speakers use ya to alert the recipient to the new topic or action they are pursuing. At TCU-final position, ya is used in turns that are not cohesive with another speaker's stance or with the speaker's own expectation. In this position the speaker retroactively marks their stance to the just-completed utterance with ya. Furthermore, the study finds that a ya which prosodically and syntactically belongs to both the prior TCU and the following TCU serves as a turn-constructional pivot extending the speakers' turn beyond the incipient point of possible completion. Overall, the findings illustrate the importance of understanding a form's usage as they occur through the progression of a turn and a sequence in naturally occurring talk, and contribute to our understanding of utterance (left/right) periphery phenomena.

„Vor allem – da erste Gedanke is ja oft auch gar nicht so gmeint“ Operatoren zur Charakterisierung des kommunikativen und mentalen Status von Äußerungen im sozialen Raum

This paper investigates discursive structures of spoken language in formal and informal communication settings (almost 62 hours of recorded time) of urban speakers in Austria’s two biggest cities Vienna and Graz and their surroundings. We focus on so-called bipartite “Operator-Skopus-Strukturen” (‘operator-scope-structures’), examining their pragmatic and discourse organising function within specific conversational situations. Our main aim is to offer in-depth analyses of these structures by characterising the mental and communicative status of such utterances. Starting out with a discussion of characteristics of spoken language research, especially by arguing for the replacement of the grammatical concept of sentences with the interactional concept of turn-constructional units, we address the phenomenon of discourse markers and Operator-Skopus-Strukturen in particular. This is followed by the description of our data set and the subsequent analyses and discussion of the selected examples. According to our findings, Operator-Skopus-Strukturen appear in both conversational settings and among all groups of speakers. We demonstrate that all speakers use the structures with the same pragmatic function of giving information to their conversation partner on how to interpret and understand the message behind the utterance. Within this scope, the speaker’s intention can vary depending on the conversation partner, the topic of the conversation or the situation.

Turn Continuations and Gesture: “And Then”-Prefacing in Multi-Party Conversations

This article offers an analysis of turn-expanding practices with the connectiveå sen‘and then’ in Swedish multi-party conversations in which the participants discuss and assess works of visual art. The connective is recurrently used to introduce a turn continuation, i.e. a stretch of talk that is produced after a possibly completed turn-constructional unit (TCU). We identify three types of continuations: same-speaker continuations, occurring post gap or post-other talk, and other-continuations by the next speaker. Some of the “and then” continuations are clausal, syntactically free-standing, while non-clausal continuations have more in common with TCU increments. “And then” continuations specify, restrict or redirect the unfolding contribution while at the same time orienting to a collective interactional project. In same-speaker continuations, the speaker can introduce a new aspect of the established theme or offer an account. Other-continuations can be used to achieve a shift in footing to introduce a somewhat non-aligning contribution. Both grammar and embodied resources (especially hand gestures) are activated in the management of the completion of a prior turn unit, the initiation of a turn continuation and the recompletion of the speaker’s turn. The typical multimodal trajectory is: syntactic completion of a first unit + retracted gesture; link to prior talk and upcoming talk with “and then” followed by the core of the continuation +aredeployed gesture; and finally, syntactic completion of the continuing unit + retracted gesture to a rest position.

Situating embodied action plans: pre-enacting and planning actions within knowledge communication in sports training

Abstract This article investigates action plans not as mental but as situated and observable activities in social interactions. I argue that projections and action plans can be understood as complex embodied practices through which actors prepare and coordinate further actions as part of a trajectory of a “communicative project”. “Projections” within ‘talk-in-interaction’ are a central topic of conversation analysis (CA), e.g. for the micro analysis of the organization of turn-taking or for the identification of turn-constructional units. Aside from former CA-studies on syntactic and prosodic features, current research using CA from a multimodal perspective shows how embodied resources, such as gestures, serve as “premonitory components” of communicative actions. Using video data of communications in sports training in trampolining, I will show how communicatively situated “embodied action plans” are applied within pre-enactments and instructions for the production of embodied knowledge. Pre-enactments not only serve the production of an ideal imagination to corporally produce intersubjectivity. Pre-enactments are also used temporally for the multimodal and visibly situating of embodied action plans, to which actors can coordinate and orientate their current and prospective communicative actions.

Collaborative construction of turn constructional units in responsive positions of question-answer sequences in Mandarin conversation

AbstractThis paper explores the features and interactional functions of collaboratively constructed TCUs (CCTs) in responsive positions of question-answer sequences in Mandarin daily conversations. Adopting the methodologies of Conversation Analysis, Interactional Linguistics and Multimodal Analysis, the study explores the sequential features of the CCTs and bodily-visual resources co-occurring with the CCTs, such as gaze orientations and gestures. Two categories have been identified based on the participants’ roles in the question-answer sequences. First, the answerer initiates the response to the question, and the questioner collaboratively completes the response. The analysis shows that the questioners are not conveying the action of answering the question but assuming the answer to the question. Second, one answerer initiates the response to the question, and another one collaboratively completes the response. The data demonstrates that this type of CCTs usually involves the two question-recipients with more or less equal epistemic access to the referent.

The Korean discourse particle kulssey across discrete positions and contexts in talk-in-interaction

The Korean discourse particle kulssey has been examined primarily as a response to a question in turn initial position, indicating the speaker's uncertainty or hesitation (e.g., ‘well’). A detailed examination of 183 instances of kulssey in ordinary conversation shows that its usage and function are much more complex. Kulssey occurs in multiple positions (in the beginning, middle, or final position of a turn-constructional unit) and carries out various functions (indexing a prior turn or proposition, serving as a filler or prospective indexical, or retroactively adding the speaker's stance to a matter just reported) across discrete or sometimes even opposite contexts (i.e., claiming or disclaiming epistemic rights, displaying agreements or disagreements). By examining its interactional usage and developmental path, the study shows how kulssey's origin as a deictic expression (kuleha-ta ‘to be like that’) is linked to its current ability to anaphorically and cataphorically index matters discussed in prior turns or about to be discussed in unfolding turns, and how this indexical function explains its mobility and versatility in talk-in-interaction. The findings are supported by diachronic and synchronic empirical examinations.

THE RULES OF TURN TAKING STRATEGIES IN ELLEN TALK SHOW

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this research is to analyze the rules realized of turn taking strategies in the Ellen talk show which every conversation always occurs the turn taking to make conversation flows well. In this case the aim of this research is to convey the rules realized of turn taking strategies use by them. The Method of this research use qualitative method. The research question will be answered in analytical description. The collected turn taking strategies is picked up randomly then classified based on the same type. The turn taking strategies is analyzed by using Miles and Huberman and Saldana to see the turn taking which mostly occurs in conversation. The result of this research shows that there are hundred eighty seven data collected from random sampling, those collected data resulted three rules of turn taking strategies: 1.If the current speaker has selected, a particular next speaker, then that speaker should take a turn at the place. 2.If no such selection has been made, then any next speaker may (but need not) self-selection occur, then first speaker has the right to the turn. 3. If no speaker has been selected, unless another speaker may, but need not, continue talking with another turn constructional unit, unless another speaker has self-selected in which case that speaker gains to the right to the turn found in that conversationKeywords: Conversation Analysis, Turn Taking Strategies, Miles Huberman and Saldana, Talk Show.

Which word gets the nuclear stress in a turn-at-talk?

Information in turns-at-talk is hierarchically structured with some information made more prominent than other information. A key indicator of information structure is nuclear stress. In this paper we aim to identify factors that correlate with nuclear stress placement.Based on exhaustive manual annotation of ten-word turns extracted from the demographically-sampled subcorpus of the British National Corpus (BNC-C), we consider a large number of factors potentially affecting nuclear placement, including duration (measured in Praat, Boersma and Weenink, 2019), word class (based on PoS tags), position in the turn (each word slot representing a position), frequency (derived from BNC), surprisal (predictability of word B given word A; e.g., Jaeger, 2010), and turn part (pre-start, turn-constructional unit [TCU], post-completer; cf. Sacks et al., 1974).To determine which variables correlate with nuclear stress, we fitted a fixed-effects binomial logistic regression model to the data. The regression analysis confirmed that nuclear stress is affected by several factors simultaneously and that the probability of a word receiving stress is highest for long, surprising, infrequent words occurring late in the turn and integrated into the TCU rather than being peripheral unless they have (extremely) high surprisal values. The study offers implications for our understanding of turn structure, arising from constraints set by turn-taking, and differential action types facilitated in different turn parts. Moreover, the results provide strong support for the assumption that speakers have access to probability distributions (e.g., Jaeger, 2010) and skillfully rely on them during turn production for interactional and informational needs arising from situated discourse.

Multi-unit turns that begin with a resaying of a prior speaker's turn

This study examines the interactional workings of multi-unit turns that have an initial turn-constructional unit that re-says the immediately prior single-unit turn produced by another speaker. Based on cases in English, Portuguese, and French, our analysis shows that resayings do confirming and also 1) index the speaker's rights over the propositional component of the words, and 2) support the extension of the turn. In addition to confirming, resayings thus claim rights to what has been said and demonstrate an entitlement to say more. The resayings thereby have both a retrospective and prospective function, the latter being closely related to turn-taking management. Our findings contribute to the existing literature on other-repeats by considering what these do in a multi-unit turn environment.

Fanzheng ‘anyway’ as a discourse pragmatic particle in Mandarin conversation: Prosody, locus, and interactional function

The Mandarin modal adverb fanzhenɡ (反正), lit. ‘back-front’, roughly translated as ‘anyway/ in any case’ etc. in English, can be used in all three positions of turn constructional units: TCU-initial, -medial, and -final. Based on prosodic and conversation structural notions, a three-way taxonomy is proposed to capture the main uses of the token in conversation: (prosodically) integrated, detached, and loosely attached, with different interactional functions. With such a multitude of flexibility, fanzheng is deemed to be evolving from an adverb to becoming a discourse pragmatic particle, with various intersubjective uses. This study shows that analyzing a versatile token such as fanzheng can raise important methodological questions about describing and identifying the relevant tokens and the functions of utterance peripheries.

Cross-Linguistic Investigation of Projection in Overlapping Agreements to Assertions: Stance-Taking as a Resource for Projection

The human ability to anticipate upcoming behavior not only enables smooth turn transitions but also makes early responses possible, as respondents use a variety of cues that provide for early projection of the type of action that is being performed. This article examines resources for projection in interaction in three unrelated languages—Finnish, Japanese, and Mandarin—in sequences where speakers make evaluative assertions on a topic. The focus is on independently agreeing responses initiated in early overlap. Our cross-linguistic analysis reveals that while projection based on the ongoing turn-constructional unit relies on language-specific grammatical constructions, projection based on the larger context seems to be less language-dependent. A crucial finding is that in the target sequences, stances taken toward the topic already during earlier talk, as well as other structural patterns, are among the resources that recipients use for projecting how and when the ongoing turn will end.

Same-turn self-repairs in Farsi conversation: On their initiation and framing

This study presents an account of the initiation and framing of self-initiated self-repairs in ongoing turn-constructional units in Farsi conversation. Informed by conversation analysis, the analysis of 636 instances of self-repairs culled from three data sources representing a wide variety of interactions revealed that there is some language-specific prosodic patterning which applies to both the foregrounding for incipient repairs and repair solutions. The particle yani (I mean, meaning), predominantly used as a pre-positioned lexical initiator, is routinely used to index a rather specific repair operation: substituting a wholly or partially uttered element of the current turn or repackaging the terms in which it has been couched. Unlike lexical initiators which are infrequent, retracting is frequently launched to fashion repair solutions, but is highly constrained by language-specific (morpho)syntactic rules. Moreover, the complementary distribution of the use of lexical initiators and retracting suggests a possible association between repair initiation and framing. The findings provide further evidence of how self-repairs which constitute a universal feature of interaction are shaped by local semiotic resources of Farsi, especially grammatical possibilities, lending further support to the interdependency of self-repairs and syntax-for-conversation.

Practices of indexing discrepant assumptions with Germanich dachte(‘I thought’) in talk-in-interaction

AbstractThis paper studies practices of indexing discrepant assumptions accomplished by turn-constructional units withich dachte(‘I thought’) in German talk-in-interaction. Building on the analysis of 141 instances from the corpus FOLK, we identify three sequential environments in whichich dachteis used to index that an assumption which a speaker (has) held contrasts with some other, contextually salient assumption. We show that practices which have been studied for EnglishI thoughtare also routinely used in German:ich dachteis a means to manage epistemic incongruencies and to contrast an incorrect with a correct assumption in narratives. In addition,ich dachteis also used to account for the speaker’s own prior actions which may have looked problematic because they built on misunderstandings which the speaker only discovered later. Moreover,ich dachte-practices may also be used to create comic effects by reporting an earlier, absurd assumption. The practices are discussed with regard to their role in regaining common ground, in managing relationships, in maintaining the identity of a rational actor, and in terms of their exploitation for other conversational interests. Special attention is paid to how co-occurring linguistic features, and sequential and pragmatic factors, account for local interpretations ofich dachte.