Co-constructed turn-taking

Abstract

Introduction Among the persistent questions around everyday, casual conversation is why transcripts seem often to be messy and incoherent for the observer or researcher, while, for the conversational participants, there seem to be few if any problems in the progression of the talk. Conversation has been variously seen as a kind of uncoordinated series of lurches rather than carefully paced walking (Krauss et al. 1995), a guessing-game where participants are continuously trying to work out what just happened, what may be happening at the moment, and what could happen next (Garfinkel 1967), or indeed an ‘easy’ activity which humans are fundamentally designed for (Garrod and Pickering 2004). Participants in conversations make sense of what is often to the observer–researcher lacking in sense. In casual conversation, sense-making is emergent and can rarely be predicted or pre-planned. The phenomena that contribute to the messy appearance of conversational transcripts include interruptions, overlaps, latched turns, aborted turns and, as is the focus of interest in the present chapter, turns that seem to be completed by a second speaker and items that seem to be, on the face of it, hooked on, on-the-fly, to the contribution of the previous speaker (Ford 2004: 30). This last is a manifestation of the fact that conversations are created by more than one speaker, and that transition from turn to turn is frequently an uncertain affair. The phenomena that trigger turn-change may produce anything from smoothly abutted, precision-timed turn-closings and turn-openings, to pauses of brief duration or longer, awkward and problematic pauses (Gardner et al. 2009), yet all against a background of a basic social compact that tries, where possible, to minimise gaps and overlaps (Stivers et al. 2009). Participants in conversations have to make sense of what has been, and is being said, and the sense-making process is interactional. In other words, it is rarely the responsibility of one party in a conversation to manage sense-creation, except in one-sided institutional conversations where a dominant party such as teacher or a therapist may exercise overt control over what is considered sense or nonsense in the flow of talk. Even in these cases, the creation of rapport and empathy is often displayed in acts of symmetrical accommodation and co-construction (Ferrara 1991, 1992). In other words, talk is, in every sense, co-constructed.