The article is the first Russian translation of the most well-known piece in conversation analysis, written by the founders of CA Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson. It has become a milestone in the development of the discipline. The authors offer a comprehensive approach to the study of conversational interactions. The approach is based on the analysis of detailed transcripts of the records of natural conversations. The authors show that in the course of the conversation co-conversationalists use a number (...) of techniques to organize the turn-taking. These techniques are combined in four rules: the first option is the transfer of speakership via allocation of the next speaker by the current speaker; if this first option is not realized, turn-taking may happen via the self-selection by one of the participants; if the second option remains unrealized too, the current speaker continues speaking, with all three options being recurrently provided at all next transition relevant places. The result of the operation of these rules is an orderly conversation based on the principle “one speaker at a time.” According to the authors, this model is compatible with obvious observations concerning conversational practices that they make. The authors show that in every conversation there is a turn-taking system in operation, which provides for a flexible adaptation of the every conversation’s structure to any possible topics and any possible speakers’ identities. Such approach considers how the participants in social interactions order their communication with each other, achieving a sense of normally occurring interaction. (shrink)

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)

Although Arbib's extension of the mirror-system hypothesis neatly sidesteps one problem with the “gesture-first” theory of language origins, it overlooks the importance of gestures that occur in current-day human linguistic performance, and this lands it with another problem. We argue that, instead of gesture-first, a system of combined vocalization and gestures would have been a more natural evolutionary unit.

In spoken interactions, interlocutors carefully plan and time their utterances, minimising gaps and overlaps between consecutive turns. Cross-linguistic comparison has indicated that spoken languages vary only minimally in terms of turn-timing, and language acquisition research has shown pre-linguistic vocal turn-taking in the first half year of life. These observations suggest that the turn-taking system may provide a fundamental basis for our linguistic capacities. The question remains however to what extent our capacity for rapid turn-taking is determined by modality constraints. The (...) avoidance of overlapping turns could be motivated by the difficulty of hearing and speaking at the same time. If so, turn-taking in sign might show greater toleration for overlap. Alternatively, signed conversations may show a similar distribution of turn-timing as spoken languages, thus avoiding both gaps and overlaps. To address this question we look at turn-timing in question-answer sequences in spontaneous conversations of Sign Language of the Netherlands. The findings indicate that although there is considerable overlap in two or more signers' articulators in conversation, when proper allowance is made for onset preparation, post-utterance retraction and the intentional holding of signs for response, turn-taking latencies in sign look remarkably like those reported for spoken language. This is consistent with the possibility that, at least with regard to responses to questions, speakers and signers follow similar time courses in planning and producing their utterances in on-going conversation. This suggests that turn-taking systems may well be a shared cognitive infrastructure underlying all modern human languages, both spoken and signed. (shrink)