Pragmatics Turn Organization, Lecture notes of English Language

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Lecture 8

Turn organization

LANG7610 Discourse Analysis Masters of Arts in Language Studies by Dr. Janice W. S. WONG [email protected]

Introduction

What’s wrong with these conversation?

• Tony Blair http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfkjvagVsRI
• Bill O’Reilly vs. Laura Ingraham http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO32JMd7l_g

Introduction

• to understand the structure of a conversation, it is important to know how turns are organised i.e., it is important to gain knowledge on how participants get a turn when they want to, and by what mechanism participants know when to take turn in a conversation
• everyday life is filled with mechanisms for organising people’s activities
• conversation is similar to these activities in the sense that there is a mechanism for organising who should speak next

The Turn-Taking System

• Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson (1978) have proposed a model of how conversational turn taking is organised
• This model focuses on two questions:
  1. out of what message units are turns constructed?
  2. by what practices (methods, techniques) are turns allocated to one participants or another?

Turn Construction

• participants can project where they will end
  • thus where a particular turn might possibly be complete
• the spot that participants recognize as the potential end of a turn, this place where a transition from one speaker to another becomes relevant, is called a “ transition relevance place ” ( TRP )

The Turn-Taking System

• 1 A: Was last night the first time you met Missiz Kelly? 2 (1.0) 3 B: Met whom? 4 A: Missiz Kelly. 5 B: Yes. What kind of unit are these utterances? Where are the TRPs?

Turn Allocation

• Sacks et al. (1978) identify three techniques by which participants determine who gets the next turn
• they propose a set of rules fixing the rights and responsibilities of the participants
• the three techniques are:
  1. current speaker selects next
  2. participant self-selects
  3. speaker continues

Turn Allocation

1) Current speaker selects next :

• 1 A: Uh you been down here before havenche. [ 2 B: Yeh.
• the current speaker, A, selects B as next speaker by directing a question to B
• that current speaker selects next has priority over the other methods of allocating the turn because it is employed before the TRP and because once it has been used no other participant may be selected as next speaker
• the current speaker may also use para-linguistic means to indicate the next speakers

Turn Allocation

• remember that participants are able to project the end of a turn construction unit and thus the occurrence of a TRP
• A produces a sentence that projects to completion just after the word "before."
• producing a statement for another participant to confirm or deny is a routine conversational action
• B may have projected a TRP at that point and gone ahead to take a normal turn
• the overlap would then be caused by A adding the tag question "havenche" to the end of a turn that B is treating as already complete

Turn Allocation

• The point to be learned from this example:
  • the smoothness and coordination we frequently find in conversation depends on: 1) the skill levels of the participants 2) on their ability to respond to unexpected events

Turn Allocation

• serious miscoordination problems can arise when:
  • one participant is a quick self-starter
  • another is slower to begin a turn (perhaps because he or she needs a more clearly marked TRP) What’s the effect of this miscoordination?
• they often attribute negative intentions or characteristics to each other

Turn Allocation

Six people are having breakfast, five of them seated around a table; B and J have just talked about someone who went skiing with his dark glasses on under his (tinted) goggles. B has just self-selected and begins to talk about yesterday’s skiing

• 49 B: Just like I did yesterday 50 I might as well have had my 51 dark glasses on under my goggles. 52 W: Yeh. ( ) [ ] 53 B: I cou- 54 I couldn't see anything. 55 (2.6) 56 J: Well it's amazing tha:tuh (.) I picked 57 the right day to get sick on.

Turn Allocation

• There is a hierarchy among these three techniques

Current speaker selects

the next speaker

Participant self-selects

Speaker continues

Turn Allocation

• The Sack et al. (1978) model portrays conversational turn taking as: - locally managed - interactionally managed by the participants