Gene H. Lerner

On the syntax of sentences-in-progress

This article describes how it could be possible for two participants engaged in conversation to jointly produce a single syntactic unit such as a sentence. From an inspection of sentence types that are achieved through such joint production, it was determined that participants have available a single utterance construction format. This format, the compound turn-constructional unit format, may be a component of a socially construed syntax-for-conversation. It can be constituted by a wide range of interactionally relevant features of talk in interaction that reveal an emerging utterance as a multiple component turn-constructional unit. The compound turn-constructional unit format is primarily a resource for turn-taking. It can be used to project the next proper place for speaker change. However, it concomitantly provides the resources needed to complete the utterance-in-progress of another participant, thus allowing for the construction of a single sentence across the talk of two speakers. (Conversation, interaction, recognizable activity)

Selecting next speaker: The context-sensitive operation of a context-free organization

This report extends earlier context-free treatments of turn-taking for conversation by describing the context-sensitive operation of the principal forms of addressing employed by current speakers to select next speakers. It first describes the context-specific limitations of gaze-directional addressing, and the selective deployment and more-than-addressing action regularly accomplished by address terms (most centrally, names). In addition to these explicit methods of addressing, this report introduces tacit forms of addressing that call on the innumerable context-specific particulars of circumstance, content, and composition to select a next speaker. (Turn-taking, turn allocation, conversation, context.)*

Finding "Face" in the Preference Structures of Talk-in-Interaction

This article connects the concept of face to interactionally characterizable locations in conversation and to a specific speaking practice used there. I consider the relevance of the self/other distinction for the organization of some action sequences in order to locate face concerns in interactional terms. In conversation, next speakers ordinarily begin speaking at or near a place where the current speaker could be finished. Occasionally, however, participants do not wait for the current speaker to finish, but complete the current turn themselves. One systematic basis for this relaxation of turn-taking practices is found in a preference organization for alternative actions in conversation. The anticipatory completion of speaking turn by another speaker can be used to preempt an emerging dispreferred action and change it into the alternative preferred action. This preference structure includes a preference for agreement over disagreement, a preference for self-correction over other-correction, and a preference far offers over requests. A recipients anticipatory completion of an ongoing speaking turn is one conversational practice that makes possible a preference relationship between asymmetrical (i.e., differently valued) action types, and furnishes a basis for the recognizability offace concerns.

Turn Design and the Organization of Participation in Instructional Activities.

Talk in interaction is the prevailing form of instructional activity. To understand and improve second language literacy instruction, an appreciation of the interactional practices in which reading and writing are embedded is necessary. In this article I examine one aspect of these practices: speaker turn design. I focus on the uses of incomplete turn‐constructional units in structuring subsequent participation. First, I describe several ways teachers design their turns at talk and show how these furnish differing opportunities for subsequent participation by students. Next, I show how the task of producing written answers as complete stand‐alone sentences can be carried out as an utterance‐completion task in which turn design plays a key organizing part. Finally, I show how this form of sequential organization can be used as an analytic resource in diagnosing a problem one group of students encounters in writing the answer to a story question.

Assisted storytelling: Deploying shared knowledge as a practical matter

Previous studies have shown that storytelling in conversation consists of more than a speaker producing an extended narrative. Stories issue from the concerted action of storyteller and story recipients. The current study identifies features of storytelling found when some participants share knowledge of the source events for the story. Practices for assisting story initiation are described. Through these practices participants arrange who will deliver the story and concomitantly establish the other participant as a story consociate and thereby as a possible co-teller. Practices for assisting the delivery of a story are then described. A set of story entry devices is identified, and these devices are shown to provide occasions for changing tellers in the course of a story. Repeated use of these devices can provided repeated opportunities for re-arranging who will continue the story, thus producing the possibility of a collaboratively told story. The report ends with a discussion of assisted story reception. Assisted storytelling is shown to be a systematic elaboration of storytelling organization with opportunities for a story consociate to participate in both the delivery and reception of the story from the story preface, throughout the story, and into the final reception by story recipients.

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.

Notes on overlap management in conversation: The case of delayed completion

A turn‐taking system allocates speaking turns in conversation. Nonetheless, on occasion speakers start up “out of turn.” This report examines one procedure, Delayed Completion, that speakers use to finish a discontinued turn after an intervening utterance by another speaker. Speakers employ resources intrinsic to the turn‐taking system, such as the projectability of turn unit completion, to regain turn occupancy and to locate the utterance of the out‐of‐turn speaker as having been interruptive. When the intervening utterance makes a next action relevant, Delayed Completion can also cancel the relevance of that next action.

Responsive List Construction: A Conversational Resource for Accomplishing Multifaceted Social Action

Research by Gail Jefferson has established that list construction in conversation can be used to perform a range of interactional tasks. This report provides an extension and application of Jeffersons work to demonstrate how this practice can be used to produce a delicately formulated, multifaceted response. A preliminary characterization of a single case of responsive list construction is presented. Next, the practice of list construction is described. List construction can be used to formulate a class of objects through an inductive procedure by moving from the particular to the general. This feature of list construction can be used to correct an error in an unexposed fashion by recasting a problematic, but possibly complete, remark as merely the first item in a list. These features of list construction are then applied as analytic resources in a further explication of an individual utterance presented at the outset of the report. Responsive list construction can be used to achieve a qualified acceptance of a prior speakers utterance by incorporating that utterance into a list of related items, thus in effect balancing multiple social concerns.

When are persons ‘white’?: on some practical asymmetries of racial reference in talk-in-interaction

This report contributes to the study of racial discourse by examining some of the practical asymmetries that obtain between different categories of racial membership as they are actually employed in talk-in-interaction. In particular, we identify three interactional environments in which the ordinarily ‘invisible’ racial category ‘white’ is employed overtly, and we describe the mechanisms through which this can occur. These mechanisms include: (1) ‘white’ surfacing ‘just in time’ as an account for action; (2) the occurrence of referential ambiguities with respect to race occasioning repairs that result in overt references to ‘white’; and (3) the operation of a recipient design consideration that we term ‘descriptive adequacy’. These findings demonstrate some ways in which the mundane invisibility of whiteness — or indeed, other locally invisible racial categories — can be both exposed and disturbed as a result of ordinary interactional processes, revealing the importance of the generic machinery of talk-in-interaction for understanding both the reproduction of and resistance to the racial dynamics of everyday life.

Or-Prefacing in the Organization of Self-Initiated Repair

This report identifies a distinct, and distinctly positioned, element of the repair segment—the repair preface—and focuses on or-prefacing to introduce the practice of repair prefacing and to develop an analysis of one preface type. Although or-prefaced repairs do substitute one formulation for another, the or-preface shows that the trouble source formulation is not being discarded altogether, thereby mitigating the reparative character of the repair operation. We also examine expanded or-prefaced repair segments for what they reveal about the part or-prefacing plays in repair. Additionally, and as part of our explication of repair prefacing, we show how some same-TCU repairs (with and without or-prefaces) can be mounted without progressivity-disrupting hitches or alerts. Data are in American and British English.