Fill-in-the-Blank Questions in Interaction: Incomplete Utterances as a Resource for Doing Inquiries (original) (raw)
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What " What? " Tells Us About How Conversationalists Manage Intersubjectivity
When studying how conversationalists assess mutual understanding, research has focused on one type of evidence: next-turn talk. This article identifies another, antecedent type of evidence involving how talk is produced by reference to repair-opportunity spaces that are systematically provided for by conversation's generic organization of repair. As current speakers talk, recipients claim understanding ex silentio on an action-by-action basis as they forgo each next repair-opportunity space-that is, as they 'withhold' talk at each next transition-relevance place. This conversation-analytic article supports its argument through an analysis of multi-action/TCU turns generally, and specifically when recipients initiate repair on such turns with: 'What?' In these cases, people respond by repairing only the most proximate action in their prior turn, which indexes their understanding that people who initiated repair understood relatively distal actions. Data are drawn from naturally occurring, ordinary, telephone conversations between friends and family members. Data are in American and British English.
Finishing each other���s... Responding to incomplete contributions in dialogue
A distinguishing feature of dialogue is that contributions can be fragmentary or incomplete. Such incomplete utterances may be later completed by another interlocutor. These cross-person compound contributions (CCs) have been hypothesised to be more likely in predictable contexts but the contributions of different sources of predictability has not been systematically investigated. In this paper we present an experiment which artificially truncates genuine contributions in ongoing text-based dialogues, to investigate the effects of lexical, syntactic and pragmatic predictability of the truncation point on the likelihood of one's interlocutor supplying a continuation. We show that what is critical is the actual and presumed accessibility of common ground, and that while people are sensitive to syntactic predictability, this alone is insufficient to prompt a completion.
Unfinished turns in French conversation: Projectability, syntax and action
Journal of Pragmatics, 2008
This paper investigates syntactically-incomplete turns in French conversation. Despite their syntactic incompleteness, these unfinished turns are regularly treated as interactionally-complete and are responded to 'appropriately' with responses that show a clear understanding of the action(s) that these unfinished turns accomplished. This paper uses a conversation-analytic approach to explore how it is possible for turns to be unfinished in conversation and to examine the resources that enable unfinished turns to receive such unproblematic and appropriate responses. Data extracts from two-party telephone conversations reveal how speakers and recipients draw upon the ability of the beginning of a turn to project roughly what it may take for the turn to be completed (projectability). In turn, interactants monitor both the progressive development and the sequential placement of turns for the ways in which they contribute to the actions that these turns accomplish (action projection). The data reveal that disruption to the progressivity of unfinished turns is not random.
2020
We report on a case study involving two participants: One participant has a communication disability and uses a high-tech, electronic device to speak, and the other is nondisabled. Th eir interaction diff ers from typical, everyday conversation because some linguistic resources are unavailable in aided speech, resulting in frequent repair sequences and slower progression. Th e analysis shows that when the aided speaker initiates an extended telling, the recipient uses questions to do repair-related actions as well as actions that could progress the story. Th us, this context aff ords the opportunity to investigate how the recipient's projections interact with intersubjectivity and progressivity.
2015
This thesis is an exploration of two interactional processes, syntactic completion and otherextension. The aim of the study is to explore what-if anything-triggers the use of these phenomena, to scrutinise their form and their interactional function and how they are received in the dialogue. The notion of the conversational turn and how the concept relates to the two phenomena is also discussed in the study. The thesis is based on an empirical study carried out in the framework of interactional linguistics which rests upon conversation analysis (CA) but also draws upon mainstream linguistics and has a linguistic viewpoint. The empirical data consist of 20 hours of everyday conversation from the ISTAL corpus of spoken Icelandic, recorded in the year 2000. Both completions and other-extensions show collaborative actions, which appear in the relaxed settings as found in the ISTAL data. The data analysed in the thesis consist of 53 examples of completions and 73 instances of other-extensions. In the thesis, completions fall into two categories. When the first speaker seems to be in trouble, for example searching for a name, the second speaker joins in with a candidate completion; that is what is called induced completions. The other category includes non-induced completions where no discernible trouble triggers the second speaker's action. Other-extensions also fall mainly into two categories, Supportive Actions and Checking Understanding, which show differences regarding form and interactional functions. Both in completions and in otherextensions, the second speaker only goes as far as to the next Transition Relevance Place (TRP); the two processes are never attempts to take over the conversational floor. These collaborative actions are both received in a positive way in the conversations with a few exceptions. Finally, it is argued that the conversational turn is not necessarily a production of one person. Two (or more) participants in a dialogue can produce collaborative turn sequences, which are found in completions and in one of the two main categories of other-extensions, i.e. the category of Supportive Actions. In Supporting Actions the second speaker carries on with the action initiated by the first speaker, he speaks in the same "direction" as the first speaker, he takes place "by his side". Either his extension highlights the first speaker's words or explicates them. In the category of Checking Understanding, a different action is carried out and therefore a new turn. The second speaker "faces" his partner in the conversation and he directs his words to the first speaker. In this category, some obscurity is often seen in the utterance preceding the extension and by reacting as the he does, the second speaker tries to avoid that a problem will come up later in the conversation. It is therefore the directionality that separates the categories of Supporting Actions and Checking Understanding when it comes to deciding whether the first speaker's utterance and the extension should be looked at as one collaborative turn sequence or as two separate turns. When two or more speakers share their turn, they also share the conversational floor and in these instances, we can talk about a collaborative floor. The appropriate surroundings for collaboratively producing a conversational turn and sharing the floor with the other participants are in friendly conversation with people who know each other's conversational behaviour.
Keeping your footing: Conversational completion in three-part sequences
Journal of Pragmatics, 1996
In a rapprochement between two rather different domains of pragmatics, we apply Goffman's notion of 'footing' to what happens when one speaker completes another speaker's utterance. Participants manage this in three-part sequences, in the third turn of which the original speaker accepts or rejects not me:rely the propositional content of the putative completion, but also the footing on which the completion is uttered. The heart of the paper demonstrates participants' orientation to footing in cases where the original utterance is on the footing of 'author', 'relayer' and 'spokesperson' in Levinson's terminology. Then we show details of how such completions are ratified (with agreement tokens, literal echos of the completion, or marks of appreciation) and rejected (by markers of dispreference and possibly by zero-appreciation turns). We then turn our attention to some findings that emerge from the analysis. These include: the role played by a suffix at the end of a completion; the limit to the power of footing to overcome the preference organisation of corrections; and how (some) completions manage to keep the floor.
The Distribution of Repair in Dialogue
csjarchive.cogsci.rpi.edu
Repairs -the various ways in which people edit and reformulate conversational turns-are a characteristic feature of natural dialogue. However, relatively little is known about their overall frequency or distribution in conversation. We present a systematic, quantitative study of patterns of repair in two corpora: 'ordinary' dialogues from the British National Corpus (BNC) and task-oriented dialogues from the HCRC Map Task. We use this analysis to evaluate three hypotheses about patterns of repair 1) social 'preferences' 2) processing demands and 3) dialogue co-ordination. The results show that repair is more frequent in task-oriented dialogue, that use of repair is broadly unaffected by familiarity or mode of interaction but substantially affected by task roles. We argue that the complimentary patterns of repair used by conversational partners support the view of repairs as an integrated, cross-turn and cross-person, system for sustaining the mutual-intelligibility of dialogue.
Cambridge Handbook of Pragmatics, 2012
The study of conversational interaction is now approached in a multitude of different ways in pragmatics, reflecting in part the ever increasing diversity of the field. Approaches range from the study of the structure and management of talk as a form of social order itself in conversation analysis, through to the study of a wide variety of pragmatic phenomena that occur in conversational interaction, including formulaic language, discourse/pragmatic markers, reference and deixis, presupposition, implicature, speech and pragmatic acts, humour, im/politeness and beyond to issues of identity and power, to name just a few. The latter study of pragmatic phenomena in conversational interaction draws from a wide range of approaches, including conversations re-constructed through the introspective methods of philosophical pragmatics, the study of naturally occurring conversations through ethnography of speaking, interactional sociolinguistics, philology, (critical) discourse analysis, interactional pragmatics and more recently corpora, and the study of conversation elicited through devices such as discourse completion tests or role plays. 1 Within this complex analytical landscape two key trends can be discerned in relation to the place of conversational interaction in pragmatics. First, the work of the ordinary language philosophers, Austin, Grice and Searle, who were all focused on analysing meaning (and to a lesser extent action) in language from ordinary conversation, has been enormously influential in regards to the ways in which conversation itself, and language data from conversation, is approached by many in pragmatics, particularly those practising cognitive and philosophical forms of pragmatics (so-called Anglo-American pragmatics). In such approaches, the analyst largely abstracts away from the details of conversation itself in order to formalise the rules and principles by which speakers mean (and to a lesser extent do) 1 See Schiffrin (1994) for a good overview of these various approaches to analysing spoken interaction, and Jucker (2009) for an excellent discussion of the various types of methodologies and their respective value for the study of speech acts in particular.
2021
This study builds on a large body of work on the use of linguistic forms for requests in social interaction. Using Conversation Analysis / Interactional Linguistics, this study explores the use of two recurrent linguistic formats for requesting in spoken German – simple interrogatives ('do you do ..?') and kannst du VP? ('can you do..?') interrogatives. Based on a corpus of video-recorded, naturally occurring data of mundane data, this study demonstrates one of the interactional factors that is relevant for the choice between alternative interrogative request formats in spoken German – recipient's embodied availability before and during the request initiation. It is shown that simple interrogatives are used to request an action from a recipient who is either available or involved in their own project, which, however, does not have to be suspended or interrupted for the compliance with the request. In contrast, kannst du VP? interrogatives occur in environments in...