Overlapping Talk In Multi-party Interaction In An Informal Institutional Setting

Overlapping talk is a seen-but-unnoticed phenomenon,which is one of the issues in the turn-taking paper by Harvey Sacks,Emanuel A.Schegloff and Gail Jefferson(1974).Gail Jefferson(1983,1986)has well established the research paradigm for the structural positions of overlaps.Subsequently,the research focus shifts to overlap management,resolution and its interactional accounts.Previous studies have shown that overwhelmingly,the overlapping talk is common but brief as a result of “one-at-a-time” rule of the turn-taking system.Nonetheless,the underlying reasons why some persistent overlapping talk occurs remain largely unexplored.For domestic researchers,their starting point for exploring overlapping talk is just the turn-taking system.What actions the participants are doing have been overlooked.Furthermore,overlapping speech in Mandarin Chinese talk-in-interaction,especially in informal institutional settings,has not been fully explored.Therefore,this dissertation aims to expand the horizon and fill the gap with a systemic exploration of overlapping talk so as to contribute to the current body of literature on Conversation Analysis(CA)in the study of Mandarin Chinese and it also hopes to show how Sacks et al.’s(1974)turn-taking system is adapted to accommodate multi-party interaction in an informal institutional setting.The study adheres to the research paradigm of CA,combining both qualitative and quantitative methods.The data come from a multi-party(the host,the expert,the guest and audience members)interaction program Road to Health broadcast on CCTV-10.Firstly,cases of the overlapping talk are identified and investigated concerning their types,positions,and distributions.Secondly,it gives empirically-based micro analyses of characteristics of overlapping talk from perspectives of turn-taking,social actions,and sequential environments.Thirdly,the grounds for the persistent overlapping talk are further explicated.The study finds out that overlapping speech at a transition relevance place(TRP)is not always produced as the by-product of the normal operation of the turn-taking system,but can also occur by design.In characterizing the nature of overlapping talk,it is not the structural position it occurs but the social actions they are implementing that determine whether it is produced by design or as a by-product.Identifying the action performed via the overlapping talk is based on the sequential context rather than the propositional content.Through overlapping talk,participants perform the same or joint action,or different actions.Different actions by means of overlapping talk can constrain other recipients’ actions relevant next,show that there is a kind of collision between participants,regarding what the participation framework particular activity is,reflect a different level of organization and demonstrate their orientation to what their roles are.Collaborative or same actions by means overlapping talk can occur as a result of turn projectability,which provides opportunities for the recipient to accomplish the turn with the current speaker.They can also occur as a result of simultaneous self-selection at a TRP,for example,co-production of question or concurrent repairs.The way in which the overlapping utterances are designed may be similar in some ways,but the way in which participants may think relevant next may reflect speakers’ different kinds of participation or relevance,and the recipient design features of the overlapping utterances reveal can be different.The study argues that to a great measure Sacks et al.’s(1974)turn-taking system accommodates the multi-party talk-in-interaction in this informal institutional setting.As the number of participants increases,the overlap may take place as a result of the recipients’ simultaneous self-selection rather than the normal operation of the turn-taking system.Apart from brief overlaps,substantial instances of persistent overlaps are also identified in the corpus.Many of them are produced simultaneously by two or more participants at a possible completion point and in the middle of the turn construction unit(TCU).Overlaps for turn competition in this corpus are deviant cases of overlaps,sporadically observed only when the host is inquiring about two guests’ opinions regarding the quiz.The grounds for participants’ persistent overlaps are associated with grammar,repair and social organization.Regarding grammatical structure,turn-projectability is susceptible to the pivot construction beyond a TCU completion point,since the segment between the onset(syntactic completion 1)and the offset(syntactic completion 2)of the pivot could be the end of the ongoing TCU and the start of a new TCU.Next speakers can come in by reference to those syntactic completions or other grammatical units(not necessarily syntactic complete)resulting being in overlap the current speaker’s turn.Mobilizing the pivot construction,the current speaker sustains to do a kind of repair in pursuit of the recipient’s uptake.Regarding repair mechanism,simultaneous repairs show participants’ orientation to the conjoint maintenance of intersubjectivity.In parallel with the current speaker’s extended self-repair,the second speaker’s persistence to do self-repair is not only demonstrably oriented to displaying the grasp of the “error” as early as possible,but also accounted as a way of showing affiliative stance.Simultaneously persistent self-repair and other-repair occur as a process of the repair organization.Such extended overlapping talk prompts the trouble source to get resolved by sequentially deleting the repair-initiation turn.In a multi-party setting,after a TRP more than one recipient can target the trouble source simultaneously and get it repaired through the extended overlapping talk.Their overlapping speech is produced as a product of the preemption in talk-in-interaction where the repair organization prioritizes the turn-taking rule.Regarding forms of social organization,speakers and hearers’ institutional tasks and roles,their rights and distribution to knowledge and non-serious form of talk(joking)are sequentially associated with persistence in the overlap.Moreover,there may be more than one form of social organization implicated in a single participant’s overlapping talk.In addition,the last item of a TCU may provide a projected opportunity for completion for next speaker(s),and the varied length of the item can accordingly result in brief as well as persistent overlapping speech.The major contributions of the dissertation can be summarized as follows: Firstly,it takes overlapping talk as the starting point to investigate how Sacks et al.’s(1974)turn-taking system is modified to accommodate in an informal institutional setting.Secondly,when describing the overlapping speech,it not only takes into account the turn-taking system,but also examines the participants involved,the social actions performed and the sequential environments where the overlapping talk is located,and grounds for their occurrences are further explicated.Thirdly,different from the previous relevant studies where,more often than not,only one speaker is taken into consideration,the present study brings all the interlocutors involved in the overlapping talk as participation information to be closely examined.Lastly,it is also an original study in the new direction for investigating persistent overlaps.An adequate analysis of persistent overlapping talk includes(1)positions;(2)participants involved and actions implemented;(3)resolution;and(4)the underlying reasons why interactants do not drop out quickly after the overlapping onsets.The four aspects may throw light upon studies of other types of overlapping talk.