Cross-Linguistic Investigation of Projection in Overlapping Agreements to Assertions: Stance-Taking as a Resource for Projection

Abstract

The human ability to anticipate upcoming behavior not only enables smooth turn transitions but also makes early responses possible, as respondents use a variety of cues that provide for early projection of the type of action that is being performed. This article examines resources for projection in interaction in three unrelated languages—Finnish, Japanese, and Mandarin—in sequences where speakers make evaluative assertions on a topic. The focus is on independently agreeing responses initiated in early overlap. Our cross-linguistic analysis reveals that while projection based on the ongoing turn-constructional unit relies on language-specific grammatical constructions, projection based on the larger context seems to be less language-dependent. A crucial finding is that in the target sequences, stances taken toward the topic already during earlier talk, as well as other structural patterns, are among the resources that recipients use for projecting how and when the ongoing turn will end.

Acknowledgments

This study was initiated within the bilateral research project “The question of units in language and interaction” funded by the Academy of Finland (P.I. Ritva Laury) and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (P.I. Ryoko Suzuki). Earlier versions of this paper have been presented at the 5th International Conference on Conversation Analysis (Loughborough, July 2018) and at the 3rd International Conference on Interactional Linguistics and Chinese Language Studies (Beijing, August 2018). We would like to thank the audiences for their valuable feedback. Thank you also to the special issue editors as well as the anonymous referees for their insightful comments that greatly helped us to improve the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For an overview of “late” projectability in Japanese, see Couper-Kuhlen and Selting (2017), pp. 42–47.

2. We are aware that prosody also plays an important role in projection. However, due to limitations of space, we concentrate in this article on other grammatical features of projection only.

3. In this study we focus on agreeing turns. The mechanism of responding early (at a non-TRP) may be different in other types of turns and sequences. In fact, there are differences among our three languages as to the number of overlaps in different sequence types and types of overlapping turns (e.g., in the Mandarin data, there are more cases of nonaffiliative overlaps than overlapping agreements). It is, after all, an empirical question whether the resources for projection are activity/sequence-type specific or response-type specific, or whether they feature in interaction more generally. This question is out of the scope of the present study.

4. In all extracts, we highlight the overlapped TCU in gray, and the overlapping agreeing turn is marked with an arrow. Glossaries for glossing and transcription symbols are in the appendices.

5. Another factor that makes the utterance recognizable as a “lesson” is that B shifts the focus from the colleague’s choice to those present and addresses a norm that concerns them using the modal expression naitodame “must.”