A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation

By H. Sacks, E. Schegloff, G. Jefferson. 1974

Publisher Summary Turn taking is used for the ordering of moves in games, for allocating political office, for regulating traffic at intersections, for the servicing of customers at business establishments, and for talking in interviews, meetings, debates, ceremonies, conversations. This chapter discusses the turn-taking system for conversation. On the basis of research using audio recordings of naturally occurring conversations, the chapter highlights the organization of turn taking for conversation and extracts some of the interest that organization has. The turn-taking system for conversation can be described in terms of two components and a set of rules. These two components are turn-constructional component and turn-constructional component. Turn-allocational techniques are distributed into two groups: (1) those in which next turn is allocated by current speaker selecting a next speaker and (2) those in which next turn is allocated by self-selection. The turn-taking rule-set provides for the localization of gap and overlap possibilities at transition-relevance places and their immediate environment, cleansing the rest of a turn's space of systematic bases for their possibility.

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Citations in the corpus

Explanation in Human-AI Systems: A Literature Meta-Review, Synopsis of Key Ideas and Publications, and Bibliography for Explainable AI (2019, methodology): “…and Parikh, 2014; Brezillon and Pomerol, 1997; Core, et al., 2006; Graesser and Franklin, 1990; Goguen et al., 1983; Graesser, Gordon, and Brainerd, 1992; Graesser, Lang, and Roberts, 1991; Sacks and Schegloff, 1974; Suthers, Woolf and Cornell, 1992; Walton, 2004, 1007, 2011; Weiner, 1989).”
Prosodic features which cue back-channel responses in English and Japanese (2000, background): “Many researchers, working from diverse perspectives, have considered back-channel feedback, along with other turn-taking phenomena, to be a phenomenon of special interest, as as being prototypical of social interaction in general (Yngve, 1970; Sacks et al., 1974; Duncan and Fiske, 1985; Ward, 1997b)”
Gaze Direction Signals Response Preference in Conversation (2017, methodology): “As the question nears its first possible completion, the place at which a response from her would be due (Sacks et al., 1974), Catherine lifts her hand from her lap and begins to rub her lip as she turns and averts her gaze from Ann (see Figure 3).”
Natural Turn-Taking Needs No Manual: Computational Theory and Model, from Perception to Action (2002, background): “It is not clear whether by ’prediction’ Sacks et al. (1974) mean ballistic action, prediction of a turn transition point in the future, or to some kind of anticipation.”
Pragmatic markers revisited with a focus on you know in adult and adolescent talk (2001, background): “Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel A. Schegloff and Gail Jefferson, 1974.”
Multi-Modality in Girls' Game Disputes (2002, methodology): “The larger data base for this study consists of a corpus of over twenty hours of videotaped interaction during children’s play, which includes hopscotch, jump rope, Chinese jump rope, and four square.”
The epistemics of student problems: Explaining mathematics in a multi-lingual class (2012, background): “The arrows indicate the turn-constructional units (Sacks et al., 1974) that form the building blocks of this discourse unit, each of which makes relevant the student's production of such tokens.”
How can insights from conversation analysis be directly applied to teaching L2 pragmatics? (2006, background): “Rules underlying sequences and turn-taking have been demonstrated to be indicative of mechanisms that point towards a set of procedures in the Garfinkelian sense that are widely shared among the members of a language community (Sacks et al., 1974; Atkinson and Heritage, 1984).”
Empathy Is All You Need: How a Conversational Agent Should Respond to Verbal Abuse (2020, background): “Turn-taking has been referred to as a speech exchange system, and turns are exclusive so that only one person has the right to speak at any one time [56].”