The core niche for language use is in verbal interaction, involving the rapid exchange of turns at talking. This paper reviews the extensive literature about this system, adding new statistical analyses of behavioral data where they have been missing, demonstrating that turn-taking has the systematic properties originally noted by Sacks et al. (1974 ; hereafter SSJ). This system poses some significant puzzles for current theories of language processing: the gaps between turns are short (of the order of 200 ms), but (...) the latencies involved in language production are much longer (over 600 ms). This seems to imply that participants in conversation must predict (or ‘project’ as SSJ have it) the end of the current speaker’s turn in order to prepare their response in advance. This in turn implies some overlap between production and comprehension despite their use of common processing resources. Collecting together what is known behaviorally and experimentally about the system, the space for systematic explanations of language processing for conversation can be significantly narrowed, and we sketch some first model of the mental processes involved for the participant preparing to speak next. (shrink)

Once assessments and continuers are focussed on as distinguishable phenomena it becomes clear that they differ from each other not just in the details of their sequential placement within an extended turn, but in other significant ways as well.First, though assessments can take the form of talk with clear lexical content (for example `Oh wow' and assessment adjectives such as ‘beautiful’), they can also be done with sounds such as ‘Ah:::’ whose main function seems to be the carrying of an (...) appropriate intonation contour, as well as gesturally (cf. M. Goodwin, 1980). In this they resemble continuers, which can be performed both with talk whose lexical status is not always granted, and with appropriate gestures such as nods. In view of the way in which both continuers and brief assessments are characteristically situated within a rather specialized environment, the ongoing talk of another, it is not surprising that they share these characteristics. Indeed in so far as these features provide minimal lexical and auditory interference with the other talk already in progress, they are precisely some of the adaptations that would be expected of action able to function in such an environment. Given such structural similarity in action that is also quite brief, the clarity with which assessments can be distinguished from continuers becomes interesting. If in fact these objects are doing different work in the same environment, the salience of their distinctness from each other becomes an important feature of the structure of each. In view of the economy and clarity that brief assessments require, it is all the more remarkable that many of them, through the details of the way in which they are pronounced and their intonation contour, are able to convey quite detailed, even intricate, information about their speaker's involvement in both the assessment and the talk of the moment.Second, while ‘uh huh’ seems to be restricted to placement in the midst of extended talk by another, assessments can occur at the completion of such extended turns as well. Indeed assessments are one of the prototypical ways of bringing an extended turn such as a story to completion. Such differential placement is quite compatible with what has already been noted about the organization of these phenomena. For example, insofar as a continuer treats the talk just heard as preliminary to further talk it would be quite inappropriate as a technique for marking completion of an extended turn. On the other hand by virtue of the way in which they appreciate the details of what has just been said without marking that talk as a prelude to something else, assessments are apt structures for doing terminal work on an extended sequence.Third, ‘uh huh’ seems to be an exclusively recipient action — indeed its work as a continuer is accomplished precisely through placement relative to more extended talk by another speaker. Assessments, however, can be done by speaker as well as recipient.Fourth, though analysis in the present paper has focussed on brief assessments (the type of assessment most similar in form to continuers), assessments unlike continuers can in fact take many shapes, some of them quite elaborate with, for example, extended sentences and even sequences of turns being devoted exclusively to the activity of doing an assessment.In sum, alternative types of action are available to recipients for constructing responses in the midst of another's extended talk. Though the responses themselves are typically brief, the presence of alternatives that can be placed in a variety of sequential positions provides recipients with resources that enable them to participate in speaker's emerging talk in a differentiated fashion, something which has consequences for speaker's actions as well. (shrink)

Previous research on the conversation analytic phenomenon of ‘repair’ has focused on its design and function in spoken interaction. Conversely, research on written text or writing rarely focuses on interaction. In this article, we examine repair in written discourse; specifically in online settings. The data corpus comprises one-to-one quasi-synchronous Facebook ‘chat’. First, we show that, as in spoken interaction, repair happens. This basic observation supports conversation analytic arguments that features of talk, like repair and laughter, do not ‘leak randomly’ into (...) interaction but are precision-timed and designed to accomplish action. Second, we report on two types of repair: visible repair which can be seen and oriented to by both participants in the interaction, and message construction repair, which is available only to the message’s writer. While the practice of message construction repair is made possible through the affordances of the online medium, it nevertheless shows how participants in written interaction are oriented to the same basic contingencies as they are in spoken talk: building sequentially organized courses of action and maintaining intersubjectivity. We suggest that assumptions about differences between spoken and online interaction are premature. Rather, we argue that online interaction should be treated as an adaptation of an oral speech-exchange system. (shrink)

This article provides an empirical demonstration of the saliency of epistemics to two core conversational organizations, turn-taking and repair. To that end, I examine cases in which a participant of a multiparty conversation intervenes into a repair sequence to respond to a repair initiation addressed to the trouble-source speaker, that is, in violation of the turn-taking rules, without having an epistemically grounded entitlement to do so. I show that such interventions enact a range of corrective actions vis-a-vis the repair initiation, (...) such as contesting and correcting assumptions or understandings conveyed by the repair initiation. In providing these corrections ‘out of turn’, the intervening speakers demonstrate their own attentive recipiency or cultural expertise and, at the same time, expose the repair initiator’s interactional faux pas. The analysis demonstrates the procedural consequentiality of epistemic considerations for the interlocutors – and, thus, the necessity to incorporate them into an empirically grounded analysis of their actions. (shrink)

The transitions between turns at talk in conversation tend to occur quickly, with only a slight gap of approximately 100 to 300 ms between them. This estimate of central tendency, however, hides a wealth of complex variation, as a number of factors, such as the type of turns involved, have been shown to influence the timing of turn transitions. This article considers one specific type of turn that does not conform to the statistical trend, namely turns that deal with troubles (...) of speaking, hearing, and understanding, known as other-initiations of repair. The results of a quantitative analysis of 169 other-initiations of repair in face-to-face conversation reveal that the most frequent cases occur after gaps of approximately 700 ms. Furthermore, other-initiations of repair that locate a source of trouble in a prior turn specifically tend to occur after shorter gaps than those that do not, and those that correct errors in a prior turn, while rare, tend to occur without delay. An analysis of the transitions before other-initiations of repair, using methods of conversation analysis, suggests that speakers use the extra time (i) to search for a late recognition of the problematic turn, (ii) to provide an opportunity for the speaker of the problematic turn to resolve the trouble independently, (iii) and to produce visual signals, such as facial gestures. In light of these results, it is argued that other-initiations of repair take priority over other turns at talk in conversation and therefore are not subject to the same rules and constraints that motivate fast turn transitions in general. (shrink)

This article deals with surgical practice as it is locally organized within the course of the operation; it focuses on the way in which surgical action shaping the body for the local purposes of the operation is organized in a timely, situated, interactive manner. In order to do that, I offer a systematic analysis of the instructions addressed by a chief surgeon to his assistant in the form of directives during a surgical operation, as well as of instructed actions of (...) the assistant following the directives of the surgeon. In this way, I aim to show how surgery is a methodic collaborative achievement, relying on finely tuned coordination between staff members. More generally, the article sketches a systematic and detailed analysis of instructions as situated accomplishments in time, and of instructed action as resulting from an embodied and indexical understanding of directives and requests as they are produced in time and in context. (shrink)

Healey et al. use experiments with chat dialogues to test the hypothesis that language co‐ordination is driven by ‘running repairs’. They replace signals of understanding such as “okay” with weaker, ‘spoof’ signals like “ummm”, and replace specific requests for clarification like “on the left?” with signals that suggest a higher degree of misunderstanding like “what?”. The latter manipulation causes participants to switch rapidly to more abstract forms of referring expression.