Gail Jefferson

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.

Sequential Aspects of Storytelling in Conversation

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on story beginnings and endings. Stories emerge from turn-by-turn talk, which is locally occasioned by it, and upon their completion, stories re-engage turn-by-turn talk, which is sequentially implicative for it. The re-engagement of turn-by-turn talk at a storys completion is a matter of sequential implicativeness in both senses, that is, at a storys ending, two discrete aspects similar to those observed for local occasioning can be found. A story can serve as a source for triggered or topically coherent subsequent talk, and a range of techniques are used to display a relationship between the story and subsequent talk. While re-engagement of turn-by-turn talk may be the primary issue upon a storys completion, there are other matters to which a storyteller may be oriented. Specifically, there may be orientation to what a recipient makes of the story and, thus, what the story has amounted to. The chapter presents a dramatic instance in which recipient displays appreciation and understanding of a story at a possible completion point.

On the Sequential Organization of Troubles-Talk in Ordinary Conversation

This paper is an investigation of conversations in which people talk about their troubles. I describe a series of recurrent, positioned elements as comprising a “candidate” troubles telling sequence. That is, the collection of troubles tellings showed a shape and a trajectory that was well-formed in some conversations and distorted in others. Thus, the array of elements in the sequence could be characterized as “vaguely orderly.” I consider whether this is due to a “rough” ordering of “big packages” in conversation (i.e., relatively long sequences of talk), or due to problematic local and general contingencies that disrupt an otherwise tight overall design.

Error correction as an interactional resource

This paper considers some small errors which occur in natural talk, treating them as matters of competence, both in the production of coherent speech and the conduct of meaningful interaction. Focusing on a rule-governed occurrence of the interjection ‘uh’, a format is described by which one can display that one is correcting an error one almost, but did not, produce. It is argued that there are systematic ways in which someone who hears such talk can find that an error was almost made and what that error would have been. Two broad classes of error are considered, both of which can be announced by and extracted from the occurrence of an error correction format. These are ‘production’ errors; i.e. a range of troubles one encounters in the attempt to produce coherent, grammatically correct speech, and ‘interactional’ errors; i.e. mistakes one might make in the attempt to speak appropriately to some co-participant(s) and/or within some situation. Focusing on interactional errors, it is proposed that the error correction format (and other formats for events other than error) can be used to invoke alternatives to some current formulation of self and other(s), situation and relationship, and thereby serve as a resource for negotiating and perhaps reformulating a current set of identities. (Conversational analysis, discourse devices (metalinguistic, attitudinal markers), U.S. English.)

The rejection of advice: Managing the problematic convergence of a ‘troubles-telling’ and a ‘service encounter’

Abstract A recurrent phenomenon in talk about a ‘trouble’ is the rejection of advice. This phenomenon is explored as a possible consequence of a convergence between two closely-related but distinctive environments for talk about a ‘trouble’, the Troubles-Telling and the Service Encounter. Each of these has its own appropriate activities and its own appropriate relationships between participants; only one of these, the Service Encounter, may have advice-giving as a proper component. The rejection of advice in a Troubles-Telling may, then, constitute an attempt to counteract the environmental shift, and the attendant shift of activities and relationships, implicated thereby.

Notes on a systematic deployment of the acknowledgement tokens “Yeah”; and “Mm Hm”;

Abstract In one of his lectures, Harvey Sacks proposes that the social sciences have tended to view a society as having “relatively few orderly products, where then much of what else takes place is more or less random.”; He offers “an image of a machine with a couple of holes in the front. It spews out some nice stuff from those holes, and out of the back it spews out garbage.”; Where, then, “the concern to find that data generated by the machine which is orderly”; tends to focus on “what are in the first instance known to be ‘big issues’, and not that which is terribly mundane, occasional, local, and the like.”; Sacks offers as an alternative approach, that “it is perfectly possible...to suppose...that wherever one happens to attack the phenomenon one is going to find detailed order. That is, one may alternatively take it that there is order at all points.”; As a student of Sacks’, I use ‘order at all points’ as a research presupposition, a working hypothesis, a base. But every now and then it appears th...

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.

On the Interactional Unpackaging of a "Gloss.".

In the reporting of a situation or event, a speaker can sometimes be seen to have omitted or ‘glossed over’ a constituent component. There are times when that component is something a speaker would rather not have the coparticipant know. Sometimes, however, the speaker is willing, indeed eager, to share this material with the coparticipant, but is constrained from simply producing it then and there (the matter being possibly bizarre, risque, or in other ways problematic). In either case, whether the problematic component is delivered or not (i.e., whether a ‘gloss’ is ‘unpackaged’) can depend upon what the coparticipant does. This report focuses on the ways in which a coparticipants activities are implicated in the maintaining as-is, or unpackaging, of a ‘glossed’ component. (Sociology, psychology, ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, sociolinguistics)

Is no an acknowledgment token? Comparing American and British uses of (+)/(-) tokens

Abstract This study investigates uses of the response-token ‘no’ by British and American speakers. Results of the study indicate that the token is used differently by members of those two cultures: ubiquitously—as a ‘continuer’—by the British, and selectively—as an ‘affiliative’—by Americans.

A case of transcriptional stereotyping

Abstract In preparation for a workshop I was to lead at the Odense conference, I was sent a tape and transcripts of conversations between a Dane and a German speaking to each other in English. The Odense transcripts were produced mainly in standard orthography. One exception was frequent use of the token ‘off’ for the word ‘of’. My hearings often disagreed with the Odense renderings of the word ‘of’. An exercise in comparison yielded results which suggest that the Odense ‘off’, rather than accurately depicting a pronunciational detail, was used in some independence of pronunciational details and might best be characterized as a stereotype; in the case of the Dane, a benign stereotype in that it does capture something the Dane tends to do, but in the case of the German, a malignant stereotype in that it altogether misrepresents what the German does.