Turn Taking Mechanisms in Conversation

Turn Taking Mechanisms in Conversation

From the amount of conversations we witness on a daily basis we can

see that they are governed by some sort of mechanism or rules. From

these observations, it becomes clear that turn taking is a major

constituent of conversation, with the arrangement of talk across two

participants. Levinson (1983: 296) explains that, despite the

‘obvious’ nature of turn taking (i.e. A speaks, then B speaks, then A

speaks again) the way in which distribution is achieved is “Anything

but obvious”. He states that “Less (and often considerably less) then

5 per cent of the speech stream is delivered in overlap, yet gaps

between one person speaking and another starting are frequently

measurable in just a few micro-seconds”. This phenomenon is of

interest to pragmaticians who, through the practise of conversational

analysis have studied conversation on the micro-pragmatic level and

have sought to theorise the mechanisms responsible.

In order to study the turn taking system operating in conversation I

transcribed three brief conversations from Big Brother 2 (Appendix).

Big Brother is a popular ‘reality T.V’ game show where contestants are

invited to live in a house for up to 8 weeks where they are constantly

monitored and filmed. The public evicts each week one contestant, with

the winner being the last contestant left. I decided to use

conversation from Big Brother for several reasons. Firstly, the

conversation was easily accessible and could be replayed repeatedly to

study the conversation in detail. Another advantage was that I was

able to see facial expressions and body language of the participants.

Knowing th...

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...alyse the

system of turn taking in respect of Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson’s

theories (1974). I found their rules for the turn taking mechanism to

be relevant to the conversations I analysed with sufficient evidence

to support their rules. I also identified other points of interest

within the transcripts and attempted to account for these using the

theories of Mey (2001), Levinson (1983) and Tannen (1990).

Bibliography

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Levinson, S.C. (1983) Pragmatics. Cambridge. CUP.

Mey. J (2001) Pragmatics: An introduction 2nd edition. Oxford.

Blackwell.

Sacks, H. E.A. Schegloff and G. Jefferson (1974) A simplest

systematics for the organization of Turn taking for conversation.

Language 50; 696 – 735.

Tannen, D. (1990) You just don’t understand: men and women in

conversation. London: Virago