Responding in Early Overlap: Recognitional Onsets in Assertion Sequences

ABSTRACT

What are speakers doing when they overlap with the previous speaker and start their response at a recognition point well before the transition-relevance place? This article adds to the body of literature on overlapping talk initiated by Gail Jefferson and shows that speakers use these turn-onset points to show that they have their own reasons to agree with what the first speaker is saying. That gets on record an equal, independent commitment to the assertion that the previous speaker is making. The overlapping speaker strives for a more balanced, symmetrical relationship with the current speaker with regard to time, speakership, and agency. The data are in Finnish and Estonian with English translation.

Notes

¹ The @ symbol refers to a change in voice quality other than to creaky or smiley voice.

² Jefferson (1986) discusses the same overlap onset types for the most part but uses slightly different terminology: Turns whose onset comes “in the middle of” the ongoing turn, for instance, are referred to as “interjacent.”

³ Contrary to the cases discussed in the current study, however, the examples Lerner analyzes are not designed to be responses to the overlapped turns.

⁴ It is also possible that the recipient merely produces an acknowledgement token as a response. However, such responses will not be analyzed here.

⁵ On occasion, the overlappers or the overlapped speakers do seem to treat the overlap as “interruptive” because, e.g., they recycle parts of their turn or discontinue the projected turn (see, e.g., ex. 1). However, this is rare in my data. For other types of overlapping, noninterruptive speech, see Lerner (2002) on choral coproduction and the studies by Pomerantz and Goodwin and Goodwin referenced previously.

⁶ According to French and Local (1983, 1986), speakers compete for the floor by designing their incoming turns with high pitch and loud volume. However, French and Local do not include an analysis of the social actions that the overlapping turns are implementing, which is the aim of the current study. My collection of early-onset turns involves patterns that are both prosodically competitive and noncompetitive (in the sense of French and Local, 1983). The prosodically competitive turns are in the minority.

⁷ Whether these should be thought of as two separate social actions or as variants of the same social action would require a separate study and will not be dealt with further here.

⁸ The speaker reformulates the structure of her utterance here on the fly: The second verb form olegi (be.cli) replaces the first verb form tahagi (want.cli).