The data for this study consist of everyday face-to-face talk-in-interaction between friends and family members in two distinct languages – in Finnish and Estonian (a brief introduction to these languages will be provided below). The data have been gathered from naturally occurring situations, involving predominantly people talking at home. These interactions would have occurred without this study because they were not organized for the sake of recording. In that sense, the talk in the data is spontaneous and authentic. (For the CA view on other issues in collecting data, see Mondada 2013.) The Finnish data have been acquired from the conversation data archive at the Department of Finnish, Finno-Ugric and Scandinavian Studies at the University of Helsinki. The videotaped Estonian data are from my own data collecting field trip to Estonia in January 2010. I selected the situations I filmed so that they would be comparable to the Finnish data in terms of the number of participants, their age and relations, and the setting. This study also accesses an additional corpus of audiotaped Estonian face-to-face data from the Corpus of Spoken Estonian at the University of Tartu.
The Finnish data, 3 hours and 15 minutes, have been videotaped. Those parts of the Estonian data that I have collected have also been videotaped (2 hours 40 minutes); the Tartu Corpus conversations are audiotaped (1 hour).14 The number of participants in each interaction varies from two to four people, and no individual takes part in more than one conversation. The age of the speakers varies between 16 to 76 years, the majority being young adults in their twenties. The total number of participants is 36, out of which 25 are female and 11 are male. More detailed information of each conversation is provided in Table 1 below.
The Finnish data are organized according to signum (“sg”) in the Helsinki archive. The Estonian audio data are numbered (“nr”) in the Tartu archive, and the abbreviations for the Estonian video data have been established for this study alone. Each of the videotaped Estonian conversations are organized in three separate files (1–3), but the conversations themselves are continuous. From the table above, we also see that all but one recording was made in the 2000s, and the length of each conversation varies.
The data have been transcribed according to the CA transcription system that was developed originally by Gail Jefferson (for example, see Hepburn &
Bolden 2013, Jefferson 2004b, Seppänen 1997). All the initial transcripts have been prepared by someone other than me, but for each fragment I make use of, I have checked the transcription and made changes and corrections as needed. For most of the fragments I present here, only the talk is transcribed (what has been said and how, which means the linguistic content and the
14 Most of the data fragments I present in this study originate from the videotaped corpus, and being the default case, this is not marked in the extracts. Instead, if the fragment is from the audiotaped corpus, there is a note “audio” at the beginning of the extract.
Table 1. The data.
corresponding prosody). Bodily-visual behavior, such as gaze and gesture, has also been transcribed where I have considered it directly relevant to the phenomenon in question (those transcriptions are mine). When presenting the data, there is an idiomatic translation into English below the original transcription line, and for the target lines, I also provide a morpheme-by-morpheme gloss. All names and other elements in the data that would enable an identification of the participants have been changed.
Table 2 below shows the number of cases of the non-transitional overlapping responses that occur in the data, which are listed according to each identified response type. This division is thus based on functional
15 For instance, f21 = female, 21 years old.
categories. The table offers a general idea of the occurrence of the phenomenon in the data:
Table 2. Tokens of each responsive action type in the collection.
Claims of similar knowledge
Independent agreements
Demonstrations of understanding
Total
Finnish 4 5 35 44
Estonian 8 6 33 47
Total 12 11 68 91
As we can see, the total number of the cases is rather similar in both languages, but the differences emerge in the different types of responses. The numbers are smaller for the first two categories than for the third. However, the fact that this is valid for both languages may reflect a wider generalization concerning the preference status of the actions involved. Even though I have provided the numbers of the cases in the table above, it is important to emphasize that I do not put much weight on counting the numbers of the cases in each language and/or response type in this study. There are several reasons for this: in this type of qualitative study, the amount of data is relatively small and so the variation in the number of different cases can to some extent be coincidental. The variation may arise due to what the situation happens to be and what the participants happen to be talking about and how. (On quantifying phenomena in conversational data, see Haakana 2002, Schegloff 1993.) It is highly challenging to find empirical evidence indicating that the possible variation is due to national characteristics, language, gender, power or something of that sort – and apart from the language, I have not coded the examples according to these types of variables. Furthermore, calculating quantified data is not one of the main aims of this study (cf. the research questions presented in section 1.2 above).
(Compare to some of the studies reported in section 2.3.)
In addition to the 91 cases presented in Table 2, I have compiled a comparative collection of approximately 50 cases where the interactional situation is otherwise similar to that in the basic cases but where the response is not positioned in non-transitional overlap. This collection will be analyzed in chapter 7.
The data include talk-in-interaction both in Finnish and Estonian. The two data sets are examined in order to not to restrict the analysis to one language only or to one conversational culture, and to be able to conduct a comparative analysis on the phenomenon. The similarity of these two languages makes it possible to hypothesize that any possible differences in turn-taking behavior are probably not due to radical differences in language structure but caused by something else. And moreover, there is the possibility of very fine-tuned differences appearing when the relation between related languages is close. Furthermore, the lay understanding of
differences in the interactional behavior among the Finns and the Estonians, alluded to in the very beginning of this chapter, could be tested at least with regard to the specific phenomenon examined in this study. Finnish and Estonian thus provide a fruitful base for comparison both between the languages and between the (alleged) conversational cultures.
Estonian and Finnish are both members of the Finno-Ugrian language family, and belong to the same sub-group, the Baltic Finnic languages.
Besides being genealogically close, these languages share most of their typological features. For example, agglutination prevails in both languages, their word classes are the same, and they share the same grammatical categories such as cases. Finnish and Estonian also have similar declension and conjugation systems, and the inflectional morphemes are likewise to a great extent similar. For instance, the nouns in both languages are inflected for number and case, and the modifiers take the same marking as the head of the phrase (in Estonian, there are a few exceptions to this). The languages also share basic syntactic structures, such as having the basic SVX word order (for example, Huumo 1993, 1994). At the same time, the word order of these languages is not regulated by the grammatical rules. Even so, there are some differences between the grammars of Finnish and Estonian, and according to Metslang (2009), these differences are mostly due to the changes in Estonian that have led to a simplification of the grammar, with the Finnish grammar remaining more complex. In addition, many parts of the lexicon are dissimilar in these languages (ibid.), and this is at least partly due to their different origins of influence (mainly Swedish for Finnish and German for Estonian). Within phonology, the differences include sound quantity and speech rhythm. In Estonian, for instance, there are three distinguishable quantities for both vowels and consonants, whereas in Finnish, there are only two. As for speech rhythm, Finnish has traditionally been characterized as syllable-timed (Karlsson 1983), but this view has recently been challenged (for example, O’Dell et al. 2007). In connection with Estonian, stress-timing has been mentioned, but not exclusively (Eek & Help 1986). (On Finnish grammar, see ISK, and on Estonian grammar, see EKG.)
Considering these linguistic dissimilarities, it has not been within the scope of this study to investigate whether they might have any special significance for turn taking. At least overall, seen from the perspective of the big picture, they do not seem to be relevant. In other words, the more important aspects of the two languages are their similarities. The morpho-syntactic resources in both languages are important for turn taking, such as case marking with its various functions (for Finnish, see Helasvuo 2001b, 2004). Indeed they are among the cues that enable the “early” projectability of the utterance completion in both these languages. (For additional information on this, see the analyses of examples 4.3, 5.3, 5.5, 6.3, 6.4, 6.9 and 6.11 below.) Nonetheless, this study does not claim that the existing differences in morphology or other parts of grammar bring about unequal opportunities for the speakers of these languages to act in interaction. The
syntactic differences between these languages do include the differences in certain word orders; this will be mentioned more precisely in section 5.2, as it becomes relevant for the analyses. Yet these differences concern more the ways in which participants accomplish actions in their turns, not the ways in which turn taking is organized.