A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation
A model of how conversation allocates turns at talk, built by Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson from audio recordings of naturally occurring conversations and examined for compatibility with fourteen grossly observable facts, among them that overwhelmingly one party talks at a time and that turn order and size are not fixed. Turns are built from units whose completion can be projected, for English including sentential, clausal, phrasal and lexical constructions, and the first possible completion is a transition-relevance place. There, ordered rules apply: a party the current speaker has selected has the right and is obliged to speak next; failing that, others may self-select, the first starter acquiring rights to the turn; failing that, the current speaker may continue, the rules applying again at each next such place. Their examination suggests that such a model will at least be locally managed, party-administered, interactionally controlled and sensitive to recipient design, talk designed to display an orientation and sensitivity to its particular co-participants.
Turns, they write, are valued, sought or avoided, and turn-taking must be at least partly shaped as an economy. A bias towards selecting the speaker just before the current one tends, as parties are added, to concentrate turns among a subset, and with three or more parties anyone wanting the next turn is under constraint to start at the first possible place. To analysts who, like Bales, read shares of talk as power or status, they add a further caution: biases in turn order may themselves skew the distribution. A closing sketch suggests an array of speech-exchange systems from conversation, which allocates one turn at a time, permitting the widest set of potential next speakers but not designed to permit a methodical equalisation of turns, to debate, which pre-allocates all turns and is, or can be, designed to permit their equalisation by specifying next speakers; meetings with a chair partially pre-allocate, the chair having rights to talk first and after each other speaker.
Limits, mostly their own: the model is, they write, certainly incorrect or insufficient in several respects, though they believe the appropriate model will be of this sort; the excerpts illustrate larger collections that space kept out, the corpus is not described and no counts are given; and they have barely looked into the comparison across speech-exchange systems. By design its major aspects are context-free, insensitive to the identities of the parties though fitted to context in use, and no formal account yet exists, they note, of how social identities are made relevant in talk. The bridge to psychological safety is ours; the paper says nothing of fear or safety. We read the first-starter rule as one reason the most eager voices take the floor, the effect Tom's one-minute silence technique sets out to counter, and a round robin, more than a chair with those rights, as moving a meeting towards the pole that can be designed to equalise turns.
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