The present study concerns turn taking in spontaneous interaction, and therefore ethnomethodological conversation analysis (henceforth CA) was selected as a suitable method for analysis. (On CA as a method, for example, see Heritage 1984b, Hutchby & Wooffitt 1998, Sidnell 2010, Sidnell & Stivers 2013, Tainio ed. 1997.) One of the very first CA articles, the ground-breaking and enormously influential paper by Sacks and his colleagues (Sacks et al.
1974), concerns the ways in which turn taking in conversation is organized, and this article has influenced many lines of subsequent CA research. Sacks and his colleagues investigated the rules and the nature of conversational turn taking in naturally occurring interactions, and several scholars after them have continued this enterprise (for example, see Hakulinen 1997, Londen 1997, and other literature reviewed in section 2.1). The central presupposition in conversation analysis is to orient to talk-in-interaction as collaboratively constructed by the participants and to examine its details from the participants’ perspective. As regards turn taking in everyday interaction, as Sacks et al (ibid.) argue, the distribution of turns, their length and their content, and the point at which turn transfer occurs are all locally managed and negotiated between the participants, moment-by-moment and
10 It may also be that the prosodic patterns for English, as described by French and Local (1983), are not applicable to Estonian and Finnish. These two languages may have some other type of coherence in their prosodic formats. However, it is apparent that this question warrants further research.
for each occasion individually. From this perspective, turn taking is an interactive achievement, and CA analysis reveals how it is accomplished between participants in real time.
According to the CA theoretical orientation, it is essential to take into account the sequential context of each detail examined. Thus, the analyst’s interpretation of utterances, turns and actions depends crucially on their preceding and subsequent environment, involving what occurred before and what came next. This important information is captured by sequential analysis (see especially Schegloff 2007). Each turn is therefore considered to be both context-sensitive and context-renewing. In short, each turn is occasioned by and reactive to the prior turn, and at the same time it also creates both expectations and the context for the next turn to be followed by it (Heritage 1984b). In this manner, turns-at-talk have reflexive relationship with the context they occur in. Interaction as well as its linguistic elements are therefore viewed as being thoroughly temporal in nature and are analyzed and interpreted as they unfold and emerge locally in time. In short, the interactional and conversational time, the “enchrony” (Enfield 2013), underlies and affects everything that occurs in the co-present social situations between participants.
A major premise of conversation analysis is that the data are authentic and naturally occurring (for additional details, see section 1.5). The starting point is that the primary home environment and the context of language use is in spoken face-to-face interaction, and that everyday talk-in-interaction is the primary site of sociability and the essence of humanity and meaning-making (for example, Schegloff 1996a: 53, Schegloff 2006). This position is one of the reasons that conversation analysis is considered to be not only a method, but a mentality as well, as it has an attitude towards what is the most appropriate and fruitful type of data to examine (for example, Mondada 2013) and the most faithful and revealing way to analyze it (for example, Sidnell 2013). Furthermore, the analyses are data-driven: the analyst is loyal to the data and investigates only what emerges from there as well as how the participants themselves orient to the phenomena. The participants’ orientations to the departures from norms constitute a means for analysts to reveal the norms that structure interaction. According to the CA position, every next turn reflects how the prior turn was perceived, and the ways in which the next speaker takes the prior turn constitute the key for the analyst in interpreting its meaning as well. This means that the analytical claims are warranted only on the basis of data-internal evidence. (Sacks 1992, Sacks et al. 1974: 728–729; for an overview on the methods, for example, see Sidnell 2013.) The current study follows these principles, which have had an influence, for instance, on the type of data used, on referring to the phenomenon in question as “overlap” and not as “interruption,” on studying the social actions that the participants accomplish with the turns they position in overlap, and on examining the wider sequential environment in which these turns occur.
One of the aspects in studying conversations and the design of turns-at-talk is their linguistic composition. In the present day, this type of scholarly work is typically conducted within the interactional linguistics (IL) framework, to which my study is also connected. IL and CA are tightly intertwined fields and are not always easily distinguishable. To characterize IL simply, scholars in this tradition are interested in how certain linguistic elements are used in interaction and how they shape interaction, and to study this, CA methods are exploited (for introductions to the field, for example, see Couper-Kuhlen & Selting 2001, Hakulinen & Selting eds. 2005;
also Schegloff et al. 1996). This line of study is most clearly evident in the current work in the sections that examine the linguistic elements of the early-onset turns and actions (sections 4.2, 5.2 and 6.2). Particularly in these sections, cross-linguistic comparison is adopted as a method (on combining conversation analysis and cross-linguistic comparison, see Härmävaara, Vatanen & Frick 2013). Comparing languages is of the essence in IL: as Couper-Kuhlen and Selting (2001: 8) observe, “the way interaction itself is conducted may be influenced by (typologically) different language practices.”
The analysis of linguistic form is relevant in understanding how participants act in conversation and as well in analyzing the actions they accomplish. One ground-breaking aspect of CA is how it has contributed to our understanding of the design of social actions. Conversation analysis began as an approach to studying social action (on the history of CA, see Heritage 1995, Maynard 2013), and actions have ever since been a central object of interest for CA scholars (for an overview of this field of enquiry, see Levinson 2013). Action is what the speaker accomplishes or implements with his/her turn. As Levinson (2013: 107) defines it, a social action is the “main job” of the turn, one with which the “response must deal with in order to count as an adequate next turn.”11 (On actions in general, see also Enfield 2013, Schegloff 1995, 1996b, and section 8.1 below.) Understanding actions as social entities thus always introduces another person, implicating the participation of another. In this way, social actions, as they are understood in CA, differ from other aspects of communication, such as speech acts (Austin 1962, Searle 1969). In this study, when the word action is used, it always denotes asocial action.12
11 Levinson’s (2013) definition ofactionis in line with Ochs’ (1996: 410) definition of social act, which she describes as “socially recognized goal-directed behavior” (for example, a request, an offer, or a compliment). Ochs (1996: 410) differentiatesact fromactivity, which for her is “a sequence of at least two social acts” (such as disputing, storytelling, interviewing, and giving advice). Simply put, activity is a larger-scale phenomenon that applies to a wider sequence such as a telling, whereasaction is considered to be something that can be attributed to a single turn, such as an offer or an invitation.
12 Furthermore, many other aspects can be thought of as actions, such as competing for turn-space (French & Local 1983) or closing a conversation (Schegloff & Sacks 1973), but this type of usage of actionis different from the one adopted here.
Studying actions is deeply connected to the basic organization of turns-at-talk and turns-at-talk-in-interaction in general (Schegloff & Sacks 1973, Schegloff 2007). Many of the turns-at-talk form what are called adjacency pairs in which there is a first turn or a first pair-part (initiating action) that sets expectations for what the second turn or a second pair-part (responsive action) should be like. For instance, a greeting is followed by another greeting (see Pillet-Shore 2012), questions result in answers (see Raevaara 1993, 1996, and 1997), etc. There can also be a set of several alternatives from which the second pair-part is selected. After an invitation, for instance, either an acceptance or a declination may follow. Adjacency-pair sequences may also be further expanded in various ways (see Schegloff 2007). In this study, the main focus is on responsive turns, that is, on the second pair-parts.
A turn’s action is relevant for all the participants in a given situation. For the speaker, it is a question of how to construct or design the turn so that its action will be recognizable by the recipient (this is called “action formation”).
For the recipient, it is a question of how to ascribe meaning to what the other speaker is doing with his/her turn in order to be able to respond adequately (this is referred to as “action recognition” or “action ascription”). (For example, see Levinson 2013 and the references therein.) When analyzing data, both participants’ perspectives need to be considered.
Actions must be analytically kept separate from practices, as Schegloff (1997) observes. Practice refers to the specific ways in which turns are designed and constructed and through which various actions then become implemented (see also Enfield 2013, Levinson 2013). There is no one-to-one relationship between any particular practice and action; instead, some practices can be exploited to implement various actions, depending on the occasion. For instance, certain questioning forms, such ashuh?, or repeats of a prior turn, can serve as a practice for the action/activity of other-initiated repair, but on other occasions, they can be exploited to implement other actions as well, such as pursuing a response or promoting a telling (Schegloff 1997). This study concerns the social actions that are involved in the sequences containing a response that is positioned in overlap, and the linguistic and other practices with which these actions are implemented will also be investigated. The positioning of a turn, such as the non-transitional overlap discussed in this study, can also be conceived of as belonging to the practices that the speakers have available for turn and action construction and meaning-making.
Examples of some of the social actions that have been studied extensively are requests (see Drew & Couper-Kuhlen, eds., forthcoming) and offers (for example, Curl 2006). The current work will contribute some additional understanding of yet another well-studied action, the assessment, but also of what is referred to as an “assertion”, a turn type that has not yet profited from much scholarly attention. An assessment involves evaluating a referent that one has knowledge about or experience of (Pomerantz 1984a). An assertion usually denotes a statement or a claim in talk, whose truth is at
issue; it is not necessarily evaluative. Assertions may, however, also be conceptualized as including assessments (Stivers 2005); it is not always simple to distinguish between the two. (For more on assertion turns, see section 8.1.) Concerning assessments specifically, scholars have described the different formats that they can take and the sequential environments they appear in (Pomerantz 1984a), how assessments are used in their contexts and the temporal character of them as well as their participation framework configurations (Goodwin & Goodwin 1987, 1992). Additional studies have been published on the use of multimodal resources in assessment sequences, especially in institutional settings (Lindström & Mondada 2009) as well as on how epistemic particles may be mobilized for specific interactional purposes within assessment sequences (Hayano 2011, 2013).
Assessments, as well as all the other actions mentioned above, are first actions. However, in comparison to first actions in general, second or responsive actions (responses to firsts) have been analyzed more extensively.
A response is a recipient’s relevant next action, which is invited by the prior turn, which may or may not meet the expectations established by the first action (first pair-part). Responses can also be classified according to their linguistic content and structure, varying from the particle-only responses to the longer clause-formatted turns (see Thompson, Fox & Couper-Kuhlen forthcoming). Sorjonen (2001a) distinguishes some environments for interactional responses in general and investigates the division of labor between the Finnish response particles joo and nii in these action environments. Thompson et al. (ibid.), like Sorjonen, discuss responding in general, and examine certain responsive actions from English language interactions, including the responses to assessments. Prior to Thompson et al., responses to assessments have also been investigated extensively in some languages. These studies include Pomerantz, Heritage and Raymond (Pomerantz 1984a, Heritage 2002, Heritage & Raymond 2005, Raymond &
Heritage 2006) who study responses to assessments in English, and Tainio, Hakulinen and Sorjonen who investigate them in Finnish (Hakulinen &
Sorjonen 2009, 2011, Sorjonen & Hakulinen 2009, Tainio 1993, 1996). Both lines of investigation demonstrate how the linguistic format of the response can be crucial for the interpretation of the fine-grained interactional work that the turn accomplishes. For instance, the grammatical formatting (such as the interrogative versus the declarative) or the word order in the response can reflect how the recipient orients to the implications of the first turn.
One crucial aspect of responsive turns is their epistemics.13 This has been one of the focuses of research interest in the early decades of CA (for example, Sacks & Schegloff 1979; see also Sharrock 1974, Heritage 1984a, Drew 1991) and has recently become an object of heightened interest within the CA community (for example, see Hayano 2013, Heritage 2012a, b, 2013,
13 Epistemics is discussed here only from the point of view of the second position, but epistemics has also been demonstrated to be relevant in first position (Heritage 2012a).
Stivers 2005, Stivers et al. 2011). The conversation analytic research on epistemics focuses on the local distribution of knowledge between participants and on how participants orient to this in their moment-by-moment interaction. Perhaps most crucial from the perspective of the current study is the analysis of knowledge in assessment sequences. Heritage and Raymond (Heritage 2002, Heritage & Raymond 2005, Raymond &
Heritage 2006) have demonstrated how English speakers orient to what they and their co-participants know and how they know it when assessing. They argue that this becomes visible in both the composition and sequential position of the assessing turns: how the speakers design their turns and when (at which position) they produce them in the local interactional situation.
The sequential and temporal positioning of a turn, its composition, as well as its epistemic dimensions are all crucial in the current study as well.
In addition to the content of the assessment itself, the responding speaker needs to indicate whether s/he agrees with the epistemic implications of the first assessment. Hayano (2011, 2013) analyzed assessment sequences in Japanese, demonstrating how Japanese speakers exploit various pragmatic particles for this purpose. Hayano also introduces the useful notion of epistemic congruence. She states that when the participants’ epistemic stances are compatible, there is epistemic congruence, and when they are not, the turns are epistemically incongruent. Stivers et al. (2011) make a further distinction between epistemic access congruence and epistemic primacy congruence. Both these types of congruence involve the participants either agreeing or disagreeing with the epistemic positioning of one another.
This agreement or disagreement concerns who knows what (access), who knows better/more (primacy), and how. (On epistemic congruence, see also Heritage 2013.) The examples in this study contain “disagreement” over epistemic matters, or epistemic incongruity. Sometimes this phenomenon is also called epistemic competition (see Stivers 2005), which is when the speakers fight over, or, less dramatically stated, they negotiate and manage the epistemic assumptions and claims in their own and others’ talk.
Epistemic congruence is largely a matter of local, situated and subtle negotiation – often implicit, yet sometimes surfacing explicitly, as the current work will demonstrate.
The strength of CA as a method for analysis is in its focus on participants’
perspective and on the analyses of sequences. This refers to how participants orient to the talk of one another and, hence, how they relate to each other.
This is my interest as well, and to investigate these aspects, I gathered my data from authentic everyday interactions and focused especially on early-onset responses, as they reflect especially clearly the current speaker’s relation to the prior speaker.