When Someone Other than the Addressed Recipient Speaks Next: Three Kinds of Intervening Action After the Selection of Next Speaker

ABSTRACT

Although speakers in conversation have ways to indicate which one of their recipients ought to speak next, who actually comes to speak next is not an automatic result. There are circumstances in which a participant other than the addressed recipient of a sequence-initiating action speaks next. Here, practices aimed at allocating turns at talk form a local, moment-to-moment normative sequential environment for other-than-addressed participant intervention. Other participants can intervene: to implement the implicated sequence-responding action, to intercede on behalf of the addressed recipient by blocking the continued relevance of a response, or to interject a supplemental action that expands the sequence before a response is produced. These sequence-organizational practices both underpin and expose such culturally prescribed grounds for intervention as personal entitlement, social obligation, and group solidarity among others. Data (happen to be) in several varieties of English found in the United States.

Notes

¹ One way that a current-selects-next technique may be flawed is through a delivery that is not recognized by other-than-addressed participants (see Lerner, 2003, p. 180).

² In the case of legacy data, I have retained the names used in many published reports. Other names have been changed.

³ Also, see Lerner (1989, p. 171, Extract 8) for another way an addressed recipient can speak next—not by reference to having been selected but by employing the turn-constructional practice of delayed completion, which can sequentially delete the relevance of an addressed question.

⁴ Conversely, Bolden (2011) describes situations in which one participant, employing a Next Turn Repair Initiator that ordinarily selects last speaker as next speaker, nevertheless explicitly selects another participant to complete the repair. There are competing entitlements here too: one’s prerogative to self-repair, whereas explicitly addressing the repair initiator to someone else selects that participant to speak next.

⁵ A corresponding turn-constructional practice can be found in the teasing other-completion of a speaker’s turn-in-progress (see Lerner, 2004, pp. 247–249).

⁶ Defending a coparticipant against inappropriate interrogation can also be an institutionally authorized practice—for a particular category of participant—as in the case of police interrogation of a suspect. Edwards & Stokoe (2011) note that lawyers regularly intervene to advise clients not to answer a question as well as to directly challenge the police for having asked a question.

⁷ This is reminiscent of the way some recipients respond to a reported trouble: not as a “troubles telling” but as a “service encounter” (see Jefferson & Lee, 1981).