The underlying orderliness of turn-taking: Examples from Australian talk

Abstract

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.