Working Turn-Taking System - Essay Example

Turn-Taking In asserting this as a fundamental feature of conversation, we are not ignoring the fact that gaps, overlaps and silence often do occur (Beattie,1978). Further, it can be shown that gaps, overlaps and more than one at a time are violations in two serious senses. First, members notice, interpret and correct them as violations of those features. Second, many occasions of violation can be shown to be consequences of the very system that accomplishes proper speaker transitions. The notion of error or violation is often a weak one in the social sciences, for the mistake may be the analysts, not the actors. For example, we now all realize that the speaker who says "Its me" is not violating a rule of English by which he should say, "Its I." Rather, the mistake belongs to the grammarian who calls it an error. Speaker transition without gap or overlap is a feature of the social organization of conversation, achieved always then and there. For example, participants do not retrospectively attain it by editing their memory of a conversation. They do not, in the first instance, go outside the conversation in order to report violations to referees, policemen, oracles, etc., in the hope that external agencies will punish the violators. There is, then, a social organization to turn-taking which has as one of its proper products that one person talks at a time: Achieving this product requires participants to encounter and solve at least two tasks: the collaborative location of transition points, and the collaborative use of means for arriving at who speaks after any current speaker (Beattie, 1983). These are tasks which, on the situated occasions of their solution, are tasks of understanding. And participants so interpret them. They take failing to talk when one has been selected to and another stops as evidence of failing to understand what has been said. The specific kinds of understanding required for achieving proper turn-taking are determined by how turn-taking is socially organized. For example, if conversation were structured so that the order of speakers and the lengths of their utterances were pre-assigned for whole conversations, turn-taking would impose rather minimal tasks of understanding upon participants (Duncan, 1972). They work in such a way as to require that parties to a conversation do extensive work of understanding if their system of turn-taking is to operate as it does. Both employ utterance units which need to be constantly monitored for their completion. Both operate to select future speakers in an one utterance at a time fashion. And both, thereby, impose upon conversation participants demanding and identical tasks of understanding and of demonstrating understanding. If speaker transition is to occur with neither gap nor overlap, any intended next speaker must work on understanding the current utterance so as to know what it will take for that utterance to be completed. Utterances must be built so that attention to them permits projecting their future (Duncan, 1974). Participants must be trained in an ability to understand that permits them to use such information in a timely fashion. It is possible to design a system in which the work of such understanding would be minimal. A linguistic particle or other sign might be required to be emitted at some specific point before the ending of an utterance. Or utterances might have to be of some pre-specified size. But, in fact, utterance completion does not operate In addition to the collaborative locating of utterance endings, any conversational system in which turns are taken one at a time, must have ways of allocating future speakership. Some formula which pre-assigned the order of all speakerships for a conversation might both reduce the chances of more than one speakership happening at once and assure that someone would be responsible to talk upon each completion. But the turn-taking systems of Thai and American conversation do not operate this way. Instead, they work one utterance at a time, employing an ordered mix of alternative ways by which next speaker is arrived at. Roughly, either current speaker selects a next, or -- current speaker not selecting a next -- first starter on completion gains rights to make an utterance (Duncan and Fiske, 1977). Even within these empirically found rules, participant work of understanding for who should or might speak next could be minimized by requiring, for example, that utterances which select a next speaker begin or end with some signal of unique designation, such as a name or social security number. Obviously, neither Thai nor American next speaker selection operates in this way. Rather, information relevant to whether a next speaker is being selected, and as to who he is, is tucked into the current utterance in such forms and at such places that the current utterance must be attended to and analyzed over its course to yield an understanding of whether anyone, and if so, who, should speak immediately next and, sometimes, of what he should do with his speech. Sequential, alternating, and responsive turn-taking is the fundamental and universal aspect of talk. Accordingly, coordinated turn-taking is essential for talk. Observation reveals that in most natural talk, transitions between turns are timed so perfectly that either there is no perceptible temporal gap or the gap is no more than a tenth of a second. Smooth turn-taking occurs in face-to-face talk and in talk on the telephone where there are no visual cues; with varying numbers of participants, including two person and multi-person talk; and in talk involving participants with different relationships and levels of formality, as for example casual talk between friends or strangers and formal talk between client and therapist (Kendon, 1967). The issue, thus, arises as to how speakers manage to coordinate their turns at talk under widely varying circumstances. One possibility is that for each type of interaction there is a set of rules that preallocates turns by specifying when each participant talks and for how long. Although there are types of talk governed by such rules, as for example the rules of turn-taking in formal debates, there do not appear to be rules in everyday talk that preallocate turns to speakers. Further, given the enormous range of types of participants, settings and topics in which the turn-taking system for natural talk must operate, there would need to be a correspondingly huge set of pre-specified rules. Indeed, since it is always possible for a new situation of talk to be encountered, the list of rules would have to be potentially infinite (Duncan and Fiske, 1977). For these reasons, it is highly unlikely that turn-taking in natural talk is governed by a set(s) of rules that preallocate turns. Rather, the system must be indexical, such that turns are allocated on a turnby-turn basis in every specific interaction. A locally-managed or indexical system for turn-taking was proposed by Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson (1974). According to these authors, turns at talk are composed of turn constructional units (single words, phrases, clauses, sentences, etc. of variable duration). The turn-taking system operates across these units. At the end of each turn constructional unit is a transition relevance place (TRP), a point at which speaker change may occur. A TRP does not necessarily occur at the end of a sentence or a set of sentences. Rather, both prosodie features (pause units, tone units, discourse markers) and pragmatic factors (who is doing what with whom on what occasion) determine the position of a TRP (Ochs, Schegloff, & Thompson, 1996). Sacks et al. (1974) proposed the following rules for the selection of next speaker at a TRP, where C is current and N is next speaker: Rule 1 applies initially at the first TRP of any turn: a) if C selects N in current turn, then C must stop speaking, and N must speak next, transition occurring at the first TRP after N-selection. b) if C does not select N, then any (other) party may self-select, first speaker gaining rights to the next turn. c) if C has not selected N, and no other party self-selects under option (b), then C may (but need not) continue. Rule 2 applies at all subsequent TRPs: when rule 1 (c) has been applied by C, then at the next TRP rules 1 (a)-(c) apply, and recursively at the next TRP, until speaker change is effected. The next three examples illustrate the operation of the turn-taking rules. Example 6:1, which comes from a class discussion between an instructor (I) and her students, including Susan (S), illustrates the operation of Rule la, C selects N. Participants orientation to turn-allocation rules minimizes gaps between turns, overlapping turns, and interruptions, and prevents one speaker from taking an extended series of turns. Of course, turn-taking does not always proceed in this way. On occasion, speakers overlap and interrupt, and one speaker may take an extended series of turns while the other mainly listens, as in narrative (Duncan, 1974). In spite of this, these phenomena all provide evidence of participants orientation to the turn allocation system. Overlap often occurs when a listener self-selects but begins too soon, or mistakenly self-selects and begins a turn when the current speaker is only pausing before continuing. Such overlaps tend to be brief as one participant quickly gives way and lets the other take the turn, thereby displaying an orientation to the turnallocation system. Another common type of overlap occurs when, as one person is taking a turn, the other overlaps with short contributions, such as mhm, right, yeah, I see, oh really, or laughter (Duncan, 1972). These structures, backchannels, display As reaction to the others turn, and are used by A to display that S should continue to hold the floor. Being given permission to hold the floor for an extended period is necessary in order to tell a story, and backchannels are common in narratives. Typically, the storyteller S displays that her next turn will be longer than usual, something that may be done through the use of metacomments (e.g., okay, so I have to tell you about my day at work today or well, that just brings me to something I was gointa ta tell you). Further, S may appeal to A for feedback and check that A understands by using tokens such as right? or okay?, or by ending utterances with rising intonation. For his part, A displays both his willingness to listen and his agreement to let S hold the floor, actions mainly accomplished by backchannels. Interruptions, occurring when one or more participants compete for the turn, are violations of the turn-allocation system. However, when interruptions occur, they are noticeable and trigger inferences. For example, someone who interrupts may be seen as someone who is attempting to control talk or someone who is an aggressive or uncooperative participant. Such inferences could only arise if participants (and analysts) orient to interruptions as actions that ought not to have occurred. Thus, an interruption and reactions to it confirm participants orientation to the very turn-allocation rules of which the interruption is a violation. In sum, the turn-by-turn structure of talk is the fundamental way interaction is accomplished. An important attribute of the system for allocating turns is that it is locally organized or indexical. Participants treat the turn-allocation system as a set of rules that ought to be followed. An important consequence of the local organization of turn-taking is that meaning is a function of composition and location of an utterance in a turn, or a turn in a sequence of turns. Sacks, Schegloff and Jeffersons Views on Turn-Taking Schegloff and Sacks also proposed a principle of adjacency pair production; namely, having produced a first pair-part of an adjacency pair, S must stop speaking, and A must produce at that point an appropriate second pair-part. In conversation, normatively and by definition ( Sacks, et al. 1974) one party talks at a time. Yet as conversants and as analysts we notice that sometimes more than one person is talking. To a critic of conversation, as to a participant, overlap may seem a violation, an error, a fault. But apparent breakdowns of conversations orderliness can be the ordered product of interactive processes. Just as impeded speech, bad grammar, or faulty logic are usually perfect conversation, so are the "mistakes" in turn-taking that we will examine perfect and complexly human interaction. Sacks, Schegloff, and Jeffersons seminal paper ( 1974) accounts for the occurrence, violative character, and correcting of overlaps. That so many overlaps occur at speakership transition points provides evidence that conversants orient themselves to and use the turn-constructional and speaker-selection principles that that paper describes. The argument, roughly, goes like this. A speaker’s, right to be sole talker is a claim to a turn of talk. Turns are built and measured with such units as a possibly complete utterance. An utterance can be built so as to be possibly complete at the possible end of a sentence, a phrase, intonation contour, etc. So there is some pressure upon a person who wants to speak next to come in a little before such a possible end. Moreover, if he doesnt come in now, he may not get to come in next. Via the ordered set of speaker selection rules, current speaker might otherwise select someone other than him to talk next, or might himself go on, or some other participant might start up first. And since utterances are expected to be relevant to what has been said immediately prior, an aspiring speaker who doesnt get to have his say next, might never get to have it. Those positions are also the most common loci of overlaps in my corpus of Thai conversations. This implies that the same turn-constructional and speaker-allocation principles operate. Every bit of talk is both special, i.e., a product of all its immediate circumstances, and general, i.e., sequentially organized. By playing one against the other, we can learn about both. Inasmuch as talk is interactionally organized and also meaningful, it is a prominent nexus of society and culture. Each component informs us about the other. Sequential analysis of Data Segments II-IV will let us track the shifting of co- and cross-categorizations, the currents and eddies of cooperation and competition among participants (Sacks et al, 1974). The organization of turn-taking makes both the ends and beginnings of turns especially susceptible to overlap, with one turns start overlapping anothers end. Segment I was an instance. Another common form of overlap is for two speakers to start up simultaneously, or close to it. Schegloff (in lectures) has shown that one source of such turn-initial overlaps is for rules of talk to assign a turn or task to a type of party for which more than one participant qualifies. Analysis of the sequential organization of conversation permits locating interactive events in the context that gave them their meaning. To the social sciences, "context" usually means something like vague surrounding features that cannot be stated except, perhaps, in retrospect. Sequential analysis provides some foothold on the technical specification of context as significant place (Sacks et al, 1974). As participants, but not yet as analysts, we also place conversations in the history of the interactions that compose a relationship and a biography. Sequential position produces the nodes from which we hang our chimes of talk. But without the scale and resonance of categorial ascriptions and the situationally occasioned normative cultural knowledge they invoke, the clacking of talk across turns is mere noise. The overlaps we have examined are typical, trivial, turn-taking events: the dullest clods of talk. But life consists of its details. It is experienced, and so lived, moment by ephemeral moment, each successive moment a complexly reticulated intersection of numerous processes. Some of those processes comprise the sequential organization of conversation. By tracking that organization we can perceive what some of our social life consists of, and provide loci and a metric -- a place and a scale -- for observing the actual ongoing operation of such mystifyingly grand processes as patron-client bonds, cooperation, social networks, or being a peasant. Much of our social life consists of talk organized as conversation with which we conjure up and deal with our fellows, expose our character, bespeak our culture. Conversation analysis provides a technical description of how that talk is organized. From this we can each see and use what we will: sometimes placing some object of scholarly interest -- an insult, say, or terms for a kinsman -- in the context which gave it local meaning, sometimes using the structure of conversation as natives do: to hook, display, articulate, and fashion things out of the web of culture. Subsequent chapters are concerned with such issues. A speaker who took time to think before he talked could not have produced these complex, artful, and exquisitely choreographed overlaps. Were the overlaps solely creatures of the rules for turn-taking, mere "natural" events like the delicate operation of enzymes, they would be less challenging. Compared to studies of turn-taking ( Sacks, et al. 1974), repair ( Schegloff, et al. 1977), or laughter ( Jefferson 1979), Sacks and Schegloff 1979 is slight and not well known. But in addition to its substantive interest, the paper offers an explicitly conversation-systemic, and so naturwissenschafter, argument that is general, straightforward, and simple enough to summarize here. Conversation as an orderly phenomenon can be described by means of rules. As with many rule-governed phenomena, there are numerous actual occasions on which different, yet applicable, rules have inconsistent outcomes. One way for a system to provide for the orderly organization of such occasions is by containing superordinate priority rules. That is, by providing that when two (or more) rules are relevant to a given situation, but have inconsistent results, one of them is to be given priority over the other(s). Among the general principles which our research tradition finds helpful for characterizing conversation are two which Sacks and Schegloff 1979 calls "the preference for minimization" and "the preference for recipient design." 5 In the organization of references to persons, minimization is expressed by it being the case that massively in conversation, references in reference occasions are accomplished by the use of a single reference form ( Sacks and Schegloff 1979:17). References Beattie, G.W. (1978). Floor apportionment and gaze in conversational dyads. British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 17, 7-16. Beattie, G.W. (1983). Talk: an analysis of speech and non-verbal behavior in conversation. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Duncan, S. (1972). Some signals and rules for taking speaking turns in conversations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 23, 283-292. Duncan, S. (1974). Some signals and rules for taking speaker turns in conversations. In S.Weitz (ed.) Nonverbal Communication (pp 298-311). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Duncan, S. & Fiske, D.W. (1977). Face-to-face Interaction: Research, Methods and Theory. New Jersey: LEA. Kendon, A. (1967). Some functions of gaze direction in two-person conversation. Acta Psychologica, 26, 22-83. Reprinted in Kendon, A. (1990) Conduction interaction: patterns of behavior in focused encounters. (pp. 51-89). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sacks et al., (1974) H. Sacks, E. A. Schegloff, and G. Jefferson, "A Simplest Systematics For the organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation," Language, 50:696-735, 1974   Read More