Retrieving, redoing and resuscitating turns in conversation

Not infrequently in conversation, a speaker launches an activity which in some way or other is intercepted by another co-participant, or is otherwise unsuccessful, such that it receives no proper uptake. Activities of this kind may simply be lost. However, speakers who did not succeed may also ‘try again’. In this paper, we describe three ways of ‘trying again’. We will show that apart from occurring in different sequential positions, they also display different constellations of prosodic and other formal features. While two of the relaunchings are related to the preceding first attempt by a systematic form shift, either upgrading or downgrading them, the third type appears in a variety of forms and will be shown to be formally unrelated to the resuscitated first activity.

• Affiliations: 1: Department of Language & Linguistics, University of York, United Kingdom; 2: Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Freiburg, Germany; 3: Department of Sociology, University of York, United Kingdom