3 I: Um. (1.2) How often do you play soccer? 4 T: Ah. Everyday.
→5 I: Everyday. (1.8) Why do you play soccer everyday?
In line 5, Ian repeats Takao’s answer (‘everyday’) twice, at the beginning and end of his turn. The first repetition is a receipt of understanding and encouragement for Takao to go on. The second repetition helps make the question clear. Both repetitions (‘do you play soccer’, ‘everyday’) make use of language Takao has chosen. All the work done by repetitions in line 5 appears to be done to help him speak in the next turn (to answer the question). The repetition of ‘everyday’ at the end of the question could display a recipient designed move to make the question more accessible to Takao in terms of forming a response, specifying how to reply.
5.3.4 Overlap as enhancement of affiliation
In previous examples of overlap, the mistiming of taking the floor was observed.
Participants become momentarily unsure who will take the next turn. However, there are other cases where overlap enhances affiliation between participants as an expression of
understanding. Non-lexical markers such as laughter and minimal receipts offer us a promising site of exploration. In the following sequence with Satoko, the first overlap happens during the asking of the initial question. The second overlap occurs while the second question is being asked. (Parts of this talk were introduced in Chapter 3, Excerpts 1 and 2 as potential sites for investigation. Here we look at the details of the overlaps.)
Excerpt 8: Satoko no. 1, America
22 S: He could build himself.
23 I: Yeah right. (2) Why did youu (.) pick him (.) out of all the
→24 char[acters in the movie? 25 S: [Hhhh
→26 I: Is there ah [some personal ah reason or …? 27 S: [Ah:::h
28 Yes personal reason. Maybe little bit similar to me.
The two overlaps (lines 24-25 and 26-27) do not appear to cause participants any particular problem as to who will speak next or what to say. There is no silence. In fact, Satoko’s laughter in line 25 seems to display her anticipation of what Ian is asking. She does not wait until the question is finished before reacting. Her laughter comes in the midst of his utterance of ‘character’. Ian appears to take the laughter as a kind of
confirmation as he reformulates his initial question to be more specific (in line 26). Next, Satoko’s stretched out receipt token in line 27 overlaps with Ian’s second question. Her token comes simultaneously with Ian’s continuation after his filled (‘ah’) pause. Again, it appears Satoko has quickly understood what is being asked and lets it be known
participants speak at the same moment. In addition, we see how Satoko manages to keep track of what she says in conjunction with the questions. Her response in line 28
addresses both of Ian’s questions (lines 23-24 and 26). In line 28, her first answer addresses the question in line 26 while her second answer addresses the initial question back in lines 23-24. This well-designed set of responses suggests that she is very clear about what is going on. Here, overlap is not stuckness, but actually a kind of precise timing which uses overlap to convey understanding (e.g., affiliation or being on the same wavelength).
5.4 Conclusion: Further thoughts on ‘stuckness’
I started the chapter with a broad list of intuitive descriptions of what stuckness would look like. This preliminary list of features was then more sharply focused into a shorter and clearer list by identifying several common features of talk-in-interaction which could serve as indications of stuckness. I described, interpreted, and analyzed examples from my data to illustrate how the phenomenon of stuckness could be seen through these indicators.
The proposed list of candidate indicators (silence, code switching, overlap, and change of topic) seems to account to some extent for how participants use these common features of talk to signal and confirm to each other that they are stuck. What became increasingly apparent to me during the process of identifying potential moments of stuckness was that participants never wait until they are completely stuck before taking some kind of
full stop. Probably for a variety of reasons (e.g., loss of face, confirmation that speaking in a foreign language is too difficult, and discouragement to try again), these participants never allow this to happen. There would be dire consequences for the rest of the talk not to mention the chances for future ones. This need to prevent a total meltdown has ramifications for any attempts to robustly define ‘stuckness’. What appears to be the conversational co-management solution for these participants is to combine the acts of indicating some kind of problem and working towards its resolution.
In a broad sense, any of the candidate indicators of stuckness could be at once the signal as well as the strategic device to get re-tuned to each other. For example, silence could show there is a problem as no one is taking the next turn, but it also allows participants time to take the following turn. Code switching could indicate a problem, but also helps address it. Overlap may indicate the mistiming of taking the floor, but it could also clear the air so either person could take the next turn. Finally, changing a topic is useful when in trouble as a way out of that trouble.
In respect for the CA practice of bringing in deviant cases (with the Schegloff 1968 study of one exception in 500 calls being the classic example) in order to strengthen any
tentative rule building efforts, I looked at some exceptions to my rule that certain features of talk were indications of stuckness. As previously mentioned, there are cases when the indications do some other kind of work besides displaying a breakdown in the timing of turns. This raises the question: If silences, code switching, overlaps, and changes of topic are capable of functioning in various ways, then how can we know when they are related
to stuckness? The question implies that some kind of deeper analysis is required to further refine the meaning of stuckness.