Turn construction unit revisited

Abstract

In Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974), a system was proposed to handle conversational turn-taking. As is well known, that system consists of two parts: a turn construction component and a turn allocation component. While the broad outline of the latter is fairly well understood and generally accepted, the former is fraud with difficulties mainly because of the lack of a satisfactory definition of the basic unit, turn constructional unit (TCU), or a robust procedure for its identification. In SSJ’s original paper, TCUs were described intuitively as ‘any word, phrase, clause, or sentence’. Realizing that this was a less than rigorous definition, SSJ appealed to linguists for help in a footnote: ‘How projection of unit-types is accomplished ... is an important question on which linguists can make major contributions.’ (p. 703) However, to date there has been little response from linguists to this invitation in spite of the venue of the paper’s publication (Language) and its massive influence. The lack of progress on this matter has led some researchers to come back to this unresolved question in recent years, notably Schegloff (1996, 2000). In this paper, I revisit this central issue and formulate an answer to the question. It is argued that the main thrust of the answer can be derived from Bloomfield’s (1933) discussion of the definition and identification of sentences, once it is realized that the questions of sentence identity and TCU identity in fact run parallel to each other. According to Bloomfield, the sentence can be defined as a combination of a syntactic structure which is in ‘absolute position’ (as opposed to ‘included position’), plus an intonation pattern. The fundamental importance of intonation is stressed in this connection: ‘The pitch phonemes [i.e. intonation patterns] … occur in every utterance, appearing even when a single word is uttered, such as John! John? John.” (Bloomfield 1933:116) Armed with this understanding and the accompanying notions of ‘full sentence’ and ‘minor sentence’, one is in a position to furnish Conversation Analysis with a principled way of distinguishing words or word-strings which are TCUs from ones which are merely parts of TCUs. This conclusion is illustrated and supported with ample evidence from Chinese and English conversational data.