24.1.1 Turns and Turn-Taking

Dialogue is characterized by turn-taking; Speaker A says something, then speaker B, then speaker A, and so on. If having a turn (or “taking the floor”) is a resource to be allocated, what is the process by which turns are allocated? How do speakers know when it is the proper time to contribute their turn?

It turns out that conversation and language itself are structured in such a way as to deal efficiently with this resource allocation problem. One source of evidence for this is the timing of the utterances in normal human conversations. While speakers can overlap each other while talking, it turns out that on average the total amount of overlap is remarkably small; perhaps less than 5% (Levinson, 1983). If speakers aren't overlapping, do they figure out when to talk by waiting for a pause after the other speaker finishes? This is also very rare. The amount of time between turns is quite small, generally less than a few hundred milliseconds even in multi-party discourse. Since it may take more than this few hundred milliseconds for the next speaker to plan the motor routines for producing their utterance, this means that speakers begin motor planning for their next utterance before the previous speaker has finished. For this to be possible, natural conversation must be set up in such a way that (most of the time) people can quickly figure out who should talk next, and exactly when they should talk. This kind of turn-taking behavior is generally studied in the field of Conversation Analysis (CA). In a key conversation-analytic paper, Sacks et al. (1974) argued that turn-taking behavior, at least in American English, is governed by a set of turn-taking rules. These rules apply at a transition-relevance place, or TRP; places where the structure of the language allows speaker shift to occur. Here is a version of the turn-taking rules simplified from Sacks et al. (1974):