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Article published In: International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Vol. 25:2 (2020) ► pp.186–215

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Turn structure and inserts

 | Albert-Ludwigs University Freiburg | Philipps-University Marburg
Published online: 28 August 2020
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.19098.ruh
Abstract
Turns-at-talk often do not start with their main business but rather with a pre-start (Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. A., & Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for the organisation of turn-taking for conversation. Language, 50(4), 696–735. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). This paper investigates the correlation of pre-starts with inserts, one of three major word classes (Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E. (1999). Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Pearson Education.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). Based on the BNC’s mark-up, I investigate how inserts are positionally distributed in large amounts of turns of varied lengths. The analysis shows that inserts are overwhelmingly attracted to turn-first positions, the likely location of pre-starts. Further, in a subsample of 1,000 ten-word turns manually coded for pre-starts, 86% of all inserts serve a pre-start function. The findings call into question current speech processing models that fail to factor in turn structure. Further, pre-starts have crucial sequential and interactional implications as early indicators whether the new turn “agrees” with the prior turn and are likely key signals aiding listeners’ action ascription.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background and aims
  • 3.Data and methods
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Inserts/Pre-starts and textual colligation
    • 5.2Inserts/Pre-starts and theories of speech planning
    • 5.3Inserts/Pre-starts, overlap, and action type
    • 5.4Inserts/Pre-starts and action ascription
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
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