Pragmatics - Volume 17, Issue 4, 2007

A new area of research called Interactional Linguistics highlights linguistic structure in relation to naturally occurring interaction and is characterized by its cross-linguistic orientation. As a contribution to this new area of research, the present volume is a collection of papers with a cross-linguistic focus; they examine what is often called an ‘increment’, a grammatical extension of the already completed unit. In this paper, we briefly discuss frameworks and orientations adopted by these studies, as well as some overall themes and common issues.

This cross-linguistic study focuses on ways in which conversationalists speak beyond a point of possible turn completion in conversation, specifically on turn extensions which are grammatically dependent, backward-looking and extend the prior action. It argues that further distinctions can be made in terms of whether the extension is prosodically integrated with the prior unit, its host, (Non-add-on) or not, and in terms of whether it repairs some part of the host (Replacement) or not. Added-on, non-repairing extensions are further distinguished in terms of whether they are grammatically fitted to the end of the host (Glue-ons) or not (Insertables). A preliminary survey of TCU continuation in English, German and Japanese conversation reveals a number of significant differences with respect to frequency and range of extension type. English is at one extreme in preferring Glue-ons over Non-Add-ons and Insertables, whereas Japanese is at the other extreme in preferring Non-add-ons and Insertables over Glue-ons. German occupies an intermediary position but is on the whole more like Japanese. The preference for Glue-ons vs. Insertables appears to reflect a language’s tendency towards syntactic left- vs. right headedness. In conclusion the study argues for a classification of ‘increment’ types which goes beyond the English-based Glue-on, attributes a central role to prosodic delivery and adopts a usage-based understanding of word order.

This paper examines the use of että-clauses in Finnish everyday conversation for extending a speaker’s turn after a possible point of turn completion for the purpose of pursuing uptake from a turn recipient. Although että-clauses are considered complements in most grammatical descriptions of Finnish, the paper questions their status as subordinate clauses. We show that they nevertheless could be considered to function as increments, as either Extensions (Glue-ons, in terms of Couper-Kuhlen & Ono, this volume) or Free Constituents. This is interesting in view of Ford, Fox & Thompson’s (2002) definition of increments as “nonmain-clause continuations after a possible point of turn completion.” We also show that what makes että-clauses ideal for the pursuit of uptake is that both as a conjunction and particle, että functions to open up the participation framework and import new voices to the conversation.

In this paper, various interactional features of turn-constructional unit (TCU) continuation as realized in Korean conversation through post-predicate elements are analyzed from a conversation-analytic perspective. Formulated as increments, post-predicate elements serve as re-completers by expanding the host TCU after it has reached a possible point of completion, which is explicitly marked by the utterance-final verb predicate. In many contexts of TCU continuation, the host TCU tends to be allusively constructed (e.g., in the form of a verb predicate with unexpressed arguments) and saliently indexical of the speaker’s affective stance, and post-predicate elements, mostly taking the form of ‘insertables’, elaborate the host TCU. TCU continuation is often realized when the action of the allusive host TCU is ‘disjunctively’ executed, with the interactional import of being potentially interruptive of the current talk-in-progress. Such an intrusive deployment of the host TCU, which is implicated in the practice of foregrounding the speaker’s collusively motivated responsive stance (e.g., in a confirmation request), is demonstrably oriented to by the speaker, who produces a post-predicate element as a methodic way of mitigating the disjunctive initiation of the prior action. The recipient also orients himself/herself to the potentially topic-derailing import associated with such a disjunctive initiation of action by way of initiating repair and/or promptly resuming his/her talk. As such, the production of a post-predicate element itself, mostly as an insertable that is grammatically and semantically related to the host, may not be directly attributed to interactional contingencies per se; it is often sequentially occasioned by practices geared towards enlivening the sequence being wrapped up, initiating or continuing an assessment sequence by way of highlighting the speaker’s evaluative stance turn-initially, or building the current turn on the prior turn through turn-tying operations. The interactional feature of post-predicate elements ‘re-doing the completion point as a transition-relevance place’ is partially manifested in the way the prosodic contour of the final or whole component of the host TCU is repeated and matched by that of the post-predicate elements.

How the status of further talk past the point of a turn’s possible completion should be described, and what functions different kinds of turn continuation might serve – these are questions that have engaged many scholars since Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson’s turn-taking model (1974). In this paper, a general scheme is proposed with which one can tease out four interlocking strands in analyzing different kinds of turn continuation: Syntactic continuity vs. discontinuity, main vs. subordinate intonation, retrospective vs. prospective orientation, and information focus vs. non-focus. These parameters combine to form different configurations and interact in interesting ways, accounting for different kinds of turn continuation. The scheme is tested on, and illustrated with, a body of naturally occurring conversational data in Chinese.

This paper examines the use of increments (Schegloff 1996, Ford et al. 2002) in naturally occurring Navajo discourse (conversation.) Navajo is a polysynthetic verb-final language belonging to the Athabascan family, spoken in the American Southwest. It finds that Navajo increments, specifically “glue-ons” (Couper-Kuhlen & Ono this volume) appear in the form of temporal or locative adverbial phrases as well as unattached NPs, as is the case in English and other languages. However, Navajo increments do not appear to serve two functions suggested by Ford et al.(2002) for increments in English: “pursuing uptake” in the case of lack of recipiency, and the indexing of a “stance display” toward the speaker’s own previous utterance. This is not surprising given other cultural differences in Athabaskan interaction which revolve around a value on individual autonomy, with important consequences for language use.

It is argued that the type of unit expansions called ‘increments’ by Schegloff 1996 is too narrowly focused on English. While the structure of English makes it particularly suited for this kind of expansion, a typologically more satisfactory approach to unit expansion runs into problems if it remains on the syntactic plane alone. A full typology will have to take into account, not only prosody and semantics, but also action structure and pragmatics at large.