Emanuel A. Schegloff

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 turns space of systematic bases for their possibility.

Opening up closings

Abstract : The paper presents some of the ways that have been developed for dealing with closings in conversation. Earlier work on conversation formulations of several problems that have been employed to cut into aspects of the data. One may derive an initial problem from a consideration of the most basic features of conversation that are now known of. A partial solution is developed. Problematic aspects of that solution lead to the derivation of another problem which permits the further illumination of the data about closings. After relating the two problems, the paper closes with an attempt to specify the domain for which the closing problems, as they have been posed seem apposite. (Author)

Overlapping talk and the organization of turn-taking for conversation

This article provides an empirically grounded account of what happens when more persons than one talk at once in conversation. It undertakes to specify when such occurrences are problematic for the participants, and for the organization of interaction; what the features of such overlapping talk are; and what constraints an account of overlapping talk should meet. It describes the practices employed by participants to deal with such simultaneous talk, and how they form an organization of practices which is related to the turn-taking organization previously described by Sacks et al. 1974. This “overlap resolution device” constitutes a previously unexplicated component of that turn-taking organization, and one that provides solutions to underspecified features of the previous account.

Analyzing single episodes of interaction: an exercise in conversation analysis

A variety of analytic resources provided by past work in conversation analysis are brought to bear on the analysis of a single utterance in its sequential context, drawn from an ordinary conversation. Various facets of the organization of talk-in-interaction are thereby both introduced and exemplified. The result displays the capacity of this analytic modality to meet a fundamental responsibility of social analysis, namely the capacity to explicate single episodes of action in interaction as a basic locus of social order.

Practices and actions: Boundary cases of other‐initiated repair

Working within a naturalistic paradigm for which the notion of “practices” is more apt than “processes,” I address the multiplicity of ties between practices of talk‐in‐interaction and the actions which they accomplish. After describing common procedures of data collection and preparation in this mode of inquiry and the “boundary cases” which these procedures may engender, I explore alternative actions which can be recognizably produced by practices of talking ordinarily associated with the action of “initiating repair.” Two practices in particular are examined: questioning terms (“huh?,” “who?,” etc.) and certain forms of repeats. As well, I show that in some contexts the action of initiating repair can be produced by a practice which does not ordinarily produce it. The moral of the article is that situated analysis must go hand‐in‐hand with more formal analysis in order to arrive at satisfactory accounts of discourse practices, and of discourse processes as well.

Presequences and indirection: Applying speech act theory to ordinary conversation

Abstract This paper contrasts the analysis provided by speech act theory for utterances of the form “Do you know + [embedded WH-question]” with the analysis demonstrably arrived at by participants in actual ordinary conversations. The analyses are found to diverge with respect both to the sets of alternative interpretations accorded the utterances and the priorities attributed to them. This result is related to the disattention in speech act theory to the temporal and sequential properties of talk-in-interaction.

On an Actual Virtual Servo-Mechanism for Guessing Bad News: A Single Case Conjecture

A conversation analytic treatment of a single episode of talk-in-interaction is used to sketch a mechanism for steering recipients of bad news to better guesses of what the news is. The account of the mechanism makes use of the notion of “preferred/dispreferred response” and distinguishes different usages of that notion. The results of the exploration are used to recommend an approach to specialized contexts in which bad news is communicated, as well as an approach to “specialized” talk more generally.

Beginning to Respond: Well-Prefaced Responses to Wh-Questions

This article reports on the occurrence of well within an analytically delimited sequential environment: turn-initial position in the second pair-part position of adjacency pair sequences launched by a wh-question. We show that these well-prefaces operate as general alerts that indicate nonstraightforwardness in responding, and we compare this form of alert to others that operate in talk-in-interaction. We conclude by addressing the relationship of answering to responding, and by considering the relationship of well-prefacing to preference organization.

Reflections on studying prosody in talk-in-interaction.

Rather than focusing on conversation as one context among many in which to study prosody, this paper approaches prosody as one set of resources and practices among many by which participants interactively produce conversation and other talk-in-interaction. Three episodes of conversation are examined, each exemplifying a different order of organization in which prosodic practices may be implicated. The first develops various lines of evidence to show that pitch peaks may be deployed and understood as projecting that a next syntactic possible completion is the designed end of the turn. In the second, the initial turns in the opening of a telephone conversation are examined as the site in which the participants work out the pitch level at which the conversation—or at least its first part—will be conducted, and thereby “negotiate” the tenor of the conversations launching. The third episode focuses on the central part which prosody can play in the constitution of the action which an utterance is implementing. The paper closes with some reflections on what is needed for students of conversation in dealing with prosody—focusing especially on the need for a relevant way of describing the mediating operations which take the prosody as (partial) input and yield the action (or other conversational feature) being accomplished as outcome.

chapter 1 – 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 turns space of systematic bases for their possibility.