The underlying orderliness of turn-taking: Examples from Australian talk
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Author(s)
Gardner, Rod
Fitzgerald, Richard
Mushin, Ilana
Griffith University Author(s)
Year published
2009
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
The 1974 paper 'Simplest systematics for the organization of turn taking in conversation', by Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson, is widely regarded as groundbreaking for its detailed and methodical understanding of the routine methods of turn taking in conversation. However, these findings also raise questions of what role, if any, a broader sociocultural context of the talk may play in organising social behaviour, and whether different kinds of orderliness, or even a different turntaking machinery, may be managed and attended to according to different social or cultural conventions. In this paper, we provide examples from a ...
View more >The 1974 paper 'Simplest systematics for the organization of turn taking in conversation', by Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson, is widely regarded as groundbreaking for its detailed and methodical understanding of the routine methods of turn taking in conversation. However, these findings also raise questions of what role, if any, a broader sociocultural context of the talk may play in organising social behaviour, and whether different kinds of orderliness, or even a different turntaking machinery, may be managed and attended to according to different social or cultural conventions. In this paper, we provide examples from a range of Australian face-to-face conversations that show that, even in talk involving extended overlap or extended gaps, the same foundational principles of order in turn-taking apply. From this evidence, we suggest that variations in length and proliferation of gaps and overlaps are not symptomatic of different turn-taking machinery, but rather are contingent on contextual and situational factors.
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View more >The 1974 paper 'Simplest systematics for the organization of turn taking in conversation', by Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson, is widely regarded as groundbreaking for its detailed and methodical understanding of the routine methods of turn taking in conversation. However, these findings also raise questions of what role, if any, a broader sociocultural context of the talk may play in organising social behaviour, and whether different kinds of orderliness, or even a different turntaking machinery, may be managed and attended to according to different social or cultural conventions. In this paper, we provide examples from a range of Australian face-to-face conversations that show that, even in talk involving extended overlap or extended gaps, the same foundational principles of order in turn-taking apply. From this evidence, we suggest that variations in length and proliferation of gaps and overlaps are not symptomatic of different turn-taking machinery, but rather are contingent on contextual and situational factors.
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Journal Title
Australian Journal of Communication
Volume
36
Issue
3
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2009. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, providing that the work is properly cited.
Subject
Language, Communication and Culture not elsewhere classified
Journalism and Professional Writing
Communication and Media Studies