The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics. Carol A. Chapelle
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said. For instance, contributing to a dialogue requires taking into consideration previously said words or utterances, while at the same time speaking according to who is listening. When participants of dialogues account for what has been said and what will be said, they do so—for the most part—by taking turns. Researchers who use conversation analysis (CA) to examine dialogues have contributed the most in terms of investigating the organization of turn taking (e.g., Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974). CA researchers have demonstrated that turn taking is organized according to an ostensibly basic, but omnipresent interactional feature known as an adjacency pair (Schegloff, 2007). An adjacency pair consists of two parts: a first pair part and a second pair part. Each part represents a turn, spoken by a different speaker. A spoken turn minimally consists of a sound that performs an action (e.g., “oh” and “ah ha”), and maximally comprises many utterances. A classic adjacency pair is a question–answer exchange.
1 (1)Speaker A:How old are you?(Question)Speaker B:I'm twenty‐nine(Answer)
The question in the above dialogue represents the first pair part of the adjacency pair, while the answer is the second pair part. It should be noted, however, that the term “adjacency pair” is slightly misleading, as first and second pair parts need not be adjacently placed.
1 (2)Speaker A:How old are you?(Question 1)Speaker B:How old are YOU?(Question 2)Speaker A:Thirty‐two(Answer 2)Speaker B:Twenty‐nine(Answer 1)
Examples 1 and 2 demonstrate that adjacency pairs play an important organizational role in co‐constructing meaning in dialogues. By taking a turn at talk, a speaker creates a set of dialogic conditions for the next turn, but at the same time reveals how the previous turn has been interpreted. In other words, any given turn in a dialogue is potentially conditionally relevant to preceding and subsequent turns. The basic organizational principle of conditional relevance is a defining feature of dialogues, as discussed using different theoretical constructs by scholars working in disciplines ranging from multimodal discourse analysis to pragmatics.
Turn taking is also organized according to how one speaker makes the transition to the next. Turn transitions are accomplished in two ways: current speaker selects next speaker or next speaker nominates self (Sacks et al., 1974). Current speaker can select next speaker by, for example, asking a question (see examples 1 and 2), while self‐nomination requires the next speaker to interject with a word or utterance. Most research done on turn transitions adopt the term “transition relevant place” (TRP) to understand how dialogues are organized (Sacks et al., 1974). In dialogues, turn transitions often occur near, but not necessarily at the end of, completed turns (Schegloff, 2000). In other words, overlapping talk is a relatively common phenomenon in dialogues. This is because dialogues unfold, from one turn to another, when the next speaker is provided with enough information in the prior turn to communicate; take, for example, the following transition in the next excerpt.
1 (3)Speaker A:Would you [like to join me?Speaker B:[Yes, I would love to.
In the above dialogue, as indicated by the two open brackets, speaker B anticipates the question and responds mid‐utterance to speaker A's invitation. The answer occurs before speaker A is able to complete her question because dialogues are organized according to not only completed turns, but also the meaning that is co‐constructed within and between utterances. The organization of dialogues, including when TRPs occur, reveal much about the interactants and interactional context. For instance, analyzing the organization of dialogues may uncover the ways in which identities are negotiated through discourse and how such critical issues shape participation in human encounters (Stamou, 2018).
Although there is a normative expectation in human encounters that one person speaks at a time (Sacks et al., 1974)—for example, when overlapping talk occurs in dyadic communicative exchanges, at least one interactant will stop speaking to let the other continue—it is not uncommon for two or more interactants to speak at the same and for sustained periods of time in dialogues (Edelsky, 1981). In such encounters, it may be useful to think of dialogues as being organized by conversational floors.
A conversational floor (or simply floor) is “a collaborative venture where several people” operate “on the same wavelength” (Edelsky, 1981, p. 383). The notion of communicating on the same discursive wavelength suggests that a dialogue is much more than a series of turns or adjacency pairs; from the perspective of a (conversational) floor, a dialogue is a discursive space where appropriate forms and ways of communicating are negotiated in situ, and according to the larger social context in which interactants find themselves communicating. Specifically, a dialogue is a floor that reflects social norms and is made up of a series of turns; dialogue participants contribute to a floor by determining what topic to discuss, establishing participatory roles, and negotiating larger social issues, such as an agenda for a business meeting. A floor can be characterized as having a thematic or functional direction (Jenks, 2007). For example, a floor can be related to the talk of negotiating a business deal or the teaching of a lesson. Examining dialogues at the floor level has revealed that a turn can be collaboratively constructed, and, despite the work of conversation analysts, the direction of a floor need not develop in a linear, one‐speaker‐per‐turn fashion (Hayashi, 1991). In fact, in multiparty dialogues— especially in situations where four or more interactants are present—it is not uncommon for one conversational floor to morph into two or more. This transformational phenomenon is often referred to as a conversational schism (Egbert, 1997). In conversational schisms, many interactants take turns at the same time while contributing to different floors, which is common in many computer‐mediated dialogues (Herring, 1999; Jenks, 2014).
Intersubjectivity
Understanding dialogues also requires uncovering the ways in which intersubjectivity is achieved within a floor or across a series of turns. That is, how do interactants make sense of each other's turns and floor contributions? Achieving intersubjectivity—or, in simple terms, to co‐construct meaning—is accomplished in a number of ways. The current section will examine two issues related to understanding the process in which interactants achieve intersubjectivity: resolving communicative troubles and maintaining understanding in the face of ostensibly no trouble in communication.
Understanding the first issue—that is, the ways in which interactants resolve troubles in dialogues—requires identifying where the trouble source is. A trouble is an umbrella term that covers all problems, mistakes, slips of the tongue, tips of the tongue, and mishearings that may occur in dialogues. For example, in example 4, speaker B requests clarification and, as a result, treats speaker A's previous turn as the source of trouble.
1 (4)Speaker A:I goed to the zoo.Speaker B:Huh?Speaker A:I went to the zoo.
Knowing where the trouble source is allows dialogue researchers to investigate many interactional issues. First, researchers can identify the sequential organization in which intersubjectivity is achieved. For example, in example 4, it takes two turns for speaker A to repair the trouble source: speaker B requests for clarification and speaker A repairs the trouble source. Second, it is also possible to identify that a speaker other than the one responsible for the trouble source initiates a request for clarification, and that the speaker of the trouble source is the interactant who corrects the trouble (Schegloff, Jefferson, & Sacks, 1977). Third, the work of linguistic anthropologists and discursive psychologists has shown that the sequential organization of dealing with troubles in communication provides an analytic window into social issues (Lester & O'Reilly, 2018). That is, how interactants deal with troubles reveals important information regarding the social roles and relationships of the interactants—whether, for example, an institutional role requires an interactant to overtly correct mistakes in communication, as is the case in many classrooms (see Seedhouse, 2004). For instance, in example 4, speaker B could be a teacher responding to a student's grammatical mistake. Fourth, researchers can examine how interactants account for troubles in communication. For example, speaker B requests clarification, but does not specifically identify where the trouble source is within speaker A's turn. As a result, an analyst can see that while speaker B does not specifically identify the trouble within the previous turn, speaker A interprets the request for clarification as a signal