Skip-connecting as a means for maintaining coherence — an aspect of the sequential organisation of talk

Abstract

The maintenance of coherence is a central aspect of any conversation, and normally we achieve coherence by interpreting the current turn in relation to the just previous turn. However, there are times where speakers want to address something that was said prior to the immediately prior turn, and in order to link two distantly placed turns, they will have to use special linguistic and interactional devices. One such device is the action of skip-connecting which ties together non-adjacently placed utterances. In this article I will describe a series of cases in which the action of skip-connecting is a highly collaborative activity, and where this orientation towards collaboration is evident both from the linguistic structure of the turn that is skip-connecting, but also from the conversational actions the skip-connecting utterance performs.