Successful Turn-bidding in English Conversation

This paper reports a study of the phenomenon of successful turn-bidding (STB) in a corpus of English conversation taken from the London-Lund Corpus of spoken English. It analyses the features of the language environment associated with turn-bidding speech acts and the linguistic devices which are used by the turn-bidders. It also examines the effect of different speech domains, different speakers' relationships, social status, and gender on the incidence of successful turn-bidding. Finally, consideration is given to the importance of successful turn-bidding strategies for the learning and teaching of English by speakers of other languages.