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Word choice, turn construction, and topic management in German conversation
Clinical guidelines require the patient’s participation in the entire rehabilitation process, including discharge planning. However, very little is known about how this institutional requirement is actually dealt with in everyday clinical practice. Adopting a conversation analytic approach, our paper tackles the matter, looking at situations in which patients achieve interactional initiatives within interdisciplinary entry meetings (IEMs) at a rehabilitation clinic in German-speaking Switzerland. Based on audio-visual recordings of 11 IEMs, whose central aim is to formulate patients’ rehabilitation goals and to plan their discharge, the paper offers a detailed analysis of two conversational environments in which patients accomplish initiatives: incipient disagreement among the interdisciplinary team and difficulties faced by the professionals in moving towards the formulation of a goal. In both situations, the progress of the activity is at stake. Moreover, the analysis reveals the interactive and stepwise accomplishment of patients’ initiatives. Our paper argues that shedding light on how patients’ initiatives are interactively implemented makes it possible to discuss how issues of epistemic rights and entitlement to participate are locally negotiated. In the final discussion, the paper raises the question of how patients’ competence in intervening in the goal-formulation activity can be taken into account in clinical guidelines on patient participation.
This conversation analytic study investigates pivot constructions used as frames for quotation in German. Specifically, it describes the use of a systematic lexical final boundary for reported speech (an 'unquote'). German has various resources to mark boundaries of quotes but is said to lack overt grammaticalized ways of 'unquoting' (e.g., enclitics, final particles). The present study documents a lexico-syntactic unquote and outlines two distinct interactional functions. It focuses on the use of syntactic pivots in Siebenburger Sachsisch, a settlement variety of German that developed in Romania. In Siebenburger Sachsisch, mirror-image frames delimit short, direct self-or other-quotes. A (past) form of san ('to say') is used in the frame. Most occur in storytelling sequences. Two functions of the quote unquote construction are identified: (1) marking or projecting the upcoming story climax by framing the first unit of the climax and (2) dealing with problems in uptake in different action environments by recompleting a turn. These two functions correspond to two distinct constructional patterns of the pivot: interactionally embedded (for marking story peaks) vs. interactionally exposed (for response pursuit). These findings further our understanding of the structuring of storytelling, the negotiation of problems in recipiency, and the importance of prosody for action formation. Crown Copyright
Today patient participation is considered “best practice”. Yet, there are different perspectives on what patient participation means. While there is a line of argument that patient participation “is justified on humane grounds alone” and in line with patients’ right to self-determination” (Guadagnoli & Ward, 1998), there is evidence that not all patients desire to be involved (Thompson et al, 2007). Policies on discharge planning from rehabilitation centres stipulate moreover that patients participate actively. It is less clear, however, how patient participation occurs and how this process is achieved interactionally. The goal of this paper is to analyse how patients participate in planning their discharge from rehabilitation centres in multidisciplinary meetings and within the health providers-patient interaction.
Three rehabilitation centres in Switzerland with a total of 37 patients and their teams of health professionals (physicians, nurses, occupational therapists, physiotherapists, etc.) participated in the study. Over 150 meetings were video recorded and analysed using Conversation Analysis, an inductive, observational method.
Patient participation is shaped by organisational structure, by health professionals’ communicative practices and by opportunities for patients to engage actively: 1) Patients participate in weekly interdisciplinary meetings, and have the opportunity to intervene directly and thereby shape decisions. 2) Primary nurses coordinate care for patients throughout their stay, and relay the patient’s point of view to other health professionals. Professionals’ way to integrate patients’ opinion into final decisions might differ significantly. 3) When interdisciplinary meetings are held without patients, the patients’ point of view is thus indirectly integrated into decision-making: different professionals work as mediators. The analysis of three sites allows a reflection on professional competencies and best practices with regard to patient participation and proposes recommendations for education and practice.
Many scholars of language have accepted a view of grammar as a clearly delineated and internally coherent structure which is best understood as a self-contained system. The contributors to this volume propose a very different way of approaching and understanding grammar, taking it as part of a broader range of systems which underlie the organisation of social life and emphasising its role in the use of language in everyday interaction and cognition. Taking as their starting-point the position that the very integrity of grammar is bound up with its place in the larger schemes of the organisation of human conduct, particularly with social interaction, their essays explore a rich variety of linkages between interaction and grammar.
This collection of original papers by eminent phoneticians, linguists and sociologists offers the most recent findings on phonetic design in interactional discourse available in an edited collection. The chapters examine the organization of phonetic detail in relation to social actions in talk-in-interaction based on data drawn from diverse languages: Japanese, English, Finnish, and German, as well as from diverse speakers: children, fluent adults and adults with language loss. Because similar methodology is deployed for the investigation of similar conversational tasks in different languages, the collection paves the way towards a cross-linguistic phonology for conversation. The studies reported in the volume make it clear that language-specific constraints are at work in determining exactly which phonetic and prosodic resources are deployed for a given purpose and how they articulate with grammar in different cultures and speech communities.
Much of our daily lives are spent talking to one another, in both ordinary conversation and more specialized settings such as meetings, interviews, classrooms, and courtrooms. It is largely through conversation that the major institutions of our society - economy, religion, politics, family and law - are implemented. This is the first in a new series of books by Emanuel Schegloff introducing the findings and theories of conversation analysis. Together, the volumes in the series when published will constitute a complete and authoritative ‘primer’ in the subject. The topic of this first volume is ‘sequence organization’ - the ways in which turns-at-talk are ordered and combined to make actions take place in conversation, such as requests, offers, complaints, and announcements. Containing many examples from real-life conversations, it will be invaluable to anyone interested in human interaction and the workings of conversation.
This thesis investigates apokoinou in Swedish talk-in-interaction. In contrast to the traditions of normative grammar and theoretically based approaches to language, where apokoinou and related phenomena have been excluded from grammatical description altogether or been treated as the products of various kinds of mistakes, apokoinou is here re-specified as a highly functional grammatical resource and method to accomplish local communicative projects in talk.
Apokoinou utterances are formally defined as the products of a construction method, where a segment that is final in a first possibly complete syntactic segment (the pivot) is retro-constructed as initial in a following second syntactic segment. The extension of the pivot segment is made by way of a doubling of syntactic constituents from the pre-pivot segment and with a prosodic design that integrates the whole utterance. From a strict and normative sentence-perspective, this doubling renders the final phase of the whole utterance incoherent with the initial phase.
However, apokoinou utterances are not incoherent for participants, but a family of methods to accomplish two consecutive actions within one utterance. The second action can change perspective on some local topical aspect, confirm or insist on some local topic or action, close and demarcate a local project, and resume turns or skip-connect to pending local communicative projects after interstitial activities. These are all recipient designed local communicative projects in the sense of being designed to fit within the ongoing wider communicative context and they are often interactionally achieved in and through minimal sequences.
These results have implications for grammatical theory. Among these are that grammar must be seen as conditions on dynamic constructional processes, not only as static and fixed structures, and that grammar is organized on a local level rather than on a maximally general level. Apokoinou should also be included in a grammar of Swedish conversational language as one of the grammatical resources available for participants in Swedish talk.
Within the general framework of agreement on a state of affairs, the matter of the terms of agreement can remain: determining whose view is the more significant or more authoritative with respect to the matter at hand. In this paper we focus on this issue as it is played out in assessment sequences. We examine four practices through which a second speaker can index the independence of an agreeing assessment from that of a first speaker, and in this way can qualify the agreement. We argue that these practices reduce the responsiveness of the second assessment to the first; in this way they resist any claim to epistemic authority that may be indexed by the first speaker in “going first” in assessing some state of affairs.
Our article investigates grammatical and prosodic aspects of turn construction in ‘Türkendeutsch’ (Turkish German), a new ethnic variety of German that is spoken mainly by Turkish adolescents. In our approach, Turkish German is regarded as a style of speaking that is systematically used as a resource for the organization of natural conversational interaction.
On the basis of interactional linguistic theory and conversation-analytic methodology, we investigate pre-positionings and post-positionings of turn constructional units, short prosodic units, and principles of accent placement on word and utterance level. In Turkish German, pre-positionings of temporal adverbs – with following V2-clauses – are often packaged in separate prosodic units with primary accents. Such prosodically exposed pre-positionings are used as focusing devices in narratives. Some kinds of post-positionings are formated according to particular rules of Turkish German which are influenced by Turkish principles of accentuation. They are deployed to shift the focus to the very end of the turn-constructional unit and thus create suspense and/or focus each bit of information separately.
Accentuation principles on both word and utterance level have been found to differ from Standard German accentuation rules in specific contexts. A speaker may playfully shift a word accent (word stress) to create ironic distance; in other instances, primary accents of utterances are shifted to constitute rhythmic coherence with prior utterances rather than to signal the focus of the utterance.
To sum up, grammatical and prosodic resources are shown to be systematically used for the organization of talk-in-interaction.
Using conversation analytic methodology, this article examines the use of the German tokens ach ‘oh’ and achso ‘oh I see’ in the uptake of repair. While achso has been studied from a functional-pragmatic perspective, no contrastive study of ach and achso exists. We investigate two questions: Do different forms of ach occur in the same sequential position? Are they associated with different interactional functions?The paper shows that in sequentially third position, repairs are receipted with ach
or
achso. The different tokens have different interactional import. While ach receipts new informational content (claiming a change-of-state, similar to English oh; Heritage 1984), it does not mark understanding. Achso, by contrast, serves as a receipt for information and prior action, claiming that speakers now share the same epistemic level and thus marking a successful repair resolution. Achso makes sequence closure relevant and is followed by a shift in action and/or topic while an ach-turn makes more talk relevant, specifically next turn confirmation.The paper concludes by discussing the component tokens ach and so separately and outlining implications for the study of epistemics through ‘little words.’
In this article, we use conversation analysis in an investigation of figurative expressions in conversation. We begin with the observation that figurative expressions are often followed by disjunctive transitions to a new topic (cf. Drew & Holt, 1988, 1995, 1998). In some instances, however, the figurative expression is used as a pivot to a new matter: The figurative expression forms a bridge connecting to the previous talk but opening up the possibility of moving away from that matter to a different one. In this article, we focus on these pivotal transitions, showing how aspects of the design of figurative expressions (such as the fact that they recurrently act as summaries and assessments of the previous detailing) make them appropriate devices for moving away from the matter at hand while at the same time enabling other matters to be introduced. Analysis of instances of these stepwise (rather than disjunctive) topic transitions raises issues concerning common difficulties in identifying topic transitions in interaction and the mechanisms by which stepwise transitions are managed.
This study is part of a body of work in Interactional Linguistics focussing on the interface of word semantics and interaction. It analyzes the meaning of the lexical item 'übrigens' (roughly translated as English 'by the way') as it appears in a corpus of 25 hours of naturally occurring everyday German conversation. In its main syntactic position in conversation – in the midfield of a verb-second sentence – it does not seem to contain the meaning previously assumed, i.e. it does not signal an upcoming disjunctive topic shift, diversion or an otherwise non-contiguous turn. An analysis of the preceding and succeeding topical context of the 'übrigens'-sentence shows no regularity in topic development. Instead, a set of observations furnishes arguments that with 'übrigens', the speaker indirectly refers to a piece of prior talk in which both the speaker and the recipient(s) were involved. The distance between the 'übrigens'-sentence and the reference utterance varies immensely. It may date back to an episode in the same conversation or even in a previous encounter. Given its formal and functional features, it is proposed that 'übrigens' in mid-sentence may be classified as a modal particle varying in meaning from its homonym in initial sentence position. The analysis concludes that series of conversations need to be considered as a unit of analysis in Interactional Linguistics since interactants orient to events in the history of their relationship by linguistic means such as word choice.
In meinem Beitrag argumentiere ich für eine breitere Diskussion der Erweiterung von Redebeiträgen über einen Abschlusspunkt hinaus. Ich zeige, dass Schegloffs Auffassung von increments zu sehr auf das Englische bezogen ist und lediglich ei- ne Form von Erweiterungen erfasst, deren genaue Definition zudem ungewiss ist. Stattdessen wird für eine Herangehensweise plädiert, die eine Vielzahl von Er- weiterungskonstruktionen vorsieht. Diese Konstruktionen müssen auf syntakti- scher, prosodischer, semantischer und pragmatischer Ebene beschrieben werden. Sie erfassen auch manche sog. elliptische Konstruktionen. English Abstract In this paper, I argue for a broader approach to turn expansions beyond a comple- tion point than the one currently dominant in conversation analysis and interac- tional linguistics. In particular, I show that Schegloff's notion of increments, in ad- dition to being ill-defined, is biased towards English and is too narrow to capture the relevant domain of phenomena. A more comprehensive approach is suggested which leads to acknowledging a whole repertoire of turn (unit) expansions. These expansions are constructions which contain syntactic, prosodic, semantic and pragmatic information. Some so-called elliptical constructions are also included.
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This paper represents part of the output of an ongoing study of clusters of phonetic parameters in the management of talk-in-interaction. Here we report on the sequential organisation and phonetic form of abrupt-joins. By abrupt-join we mean to adumbrate a complex of recurrent phonetic events which attend a point of possible turn-completion, and the beginning of an immediately subsequent turn-constructional unit (TCU) produced by that same speaker. In doing an abrupt-join, the speaker can be seen to preempt the transition relevance and interactional implicativeness of the first unit. The phonetic features which constitute this practice include duration, rhythm, pitch, loudness and articulatory characteristics of both the end of the first unit and the beginning of the second. Abrupt-joins are a resource used in the building of a particular kind of multi-unit turn, where each unit performs a discrete action with the abrupt-join marking the juncture between them, with the subsequent talk changing the sequential trajectory projectable from the talk leading up to the abrupt-join. One clear distributional pattern emerges from the data: abrupt-joins occur regularly in closing-relevant and topic-transition sequences.
In everyday English conversation, talk can be produced such that it is simultaneously a grammatical ending of what precedes it, and a beginning of what follows (e.g. “that's what I’d like to have is a fresh one”). A range of features of phonetic design (including pitch, loudness, duration, and articulatory characteristics) are shown to be deployed in systematic ways in order to handle the dual tasks of avoiding the signaling of transition relevance at the end of the pivot, and marking out the fittedness of the pivot to both what precedes and what follows. Turns built with pivots are found to be most often engaged in assessing, enquiring, or reporting, though their more general application as a practice for the continuation of a turn past a point of possible syntactic and pragmatic completion is emphasized.
Cecilia E. Ford explores the question: what work do adverbial clauses do in conversational interaction? Her analysis of this predominating conjunction strategy in English conversation is based on the assumption that grammars reflect recurrent patterns of situated language use, and that a primary site for language is in spontaneous talk. She considers the interactional as well as the informational work of talk and shows how conversationalists use grammar to coordinate their joint language production. The management of the complexities of the sequential development of a conversation, and the social roles of conversational participants, have been extensively examined within the sociological approach of Conversation Analysis. Dr Ford uses Conversation Analysis as a framework for the interpretation of interclausal relations in her database of American English conversations. Her book contributes to a growing body of research on grammar in discourse, which has until recently remained largely focused on monologic rather than dialogic functions of language.
This book uses Conversation Analysis methodology to analyze rhetorical and other questions that are designed to convey assertions, rather than seek new information. It shows how these question sequences unfold interactionally in naturally-occurring talk in a variety of settings, e.g., friends arguing over the phone, parents disciplining children, news interviews, and second language writing conferences. The questions are used across these widely different contexts to perform a number of related social actions such as accusations, challenges to prior turns, and complaints. Those used in institution settings, such as teacher-student conferences, orient to institutional norms and roles and can help accomplish institutional goals, e.g., eliciting student error correction. Both the interactional context in which these questions are embedded and the known epistemic authority of the questioner play a role in our understanding of these questions, i.e., what social actions the question is accomplishing in a particular interaction.
Einfache Subjekt-Prädikat-Sätze vom Typ Jochen lächelt; Helga schläft enthalten zwei Bestandteile, mit denen der Sprecher, wenn er den Satz äußert, referiert (Subjekt) und prädiziert (Prädikat). Durch Referieren und Prädizieren kommt man zur Bezeichnung von Sachverhalten, deren Bestehen behauptet, erfragt, gewünscht oder gefordert werden kann (1.2). Zur Erfassung grundlegender grammatischer Eigenschaften des Verbs beschränken wir uns im Folgenden auf die Betrachtung von Aussagesätzen. Und wir stellen uns vor, dass ein solcher Satz geäußert wird, um von dem bezeichneten Sachverhalt festzustellen oder zu behaupten, dass er zutrifft.
This volume is a collection of current work at the interface of linguistics and conversation analysis. The focus is on linguistic items in their action contexts: syntactic structures and lexical items in data from natural conversations in six European languages: Danish, English, Finnish, German, Italian and Swedish. Some of the studies deal with similar practices in two different languages, which enables cross-linguistic comparisons. The notion of 'construction' is brought together with an interactional perspective; the fact that constructions cannot always be clearly analysed as either syntactic or lexico-semantic has its reflection in this volume.
So far, there have been fewer attempts at interactionally oriented work on lexical and semantic phenomena than on syntactic constructions. In this volume, several papers show the interactional relevance of word selection and lexical semantic issues. In the future, studies on syntax and lexico-semantics in interaction will enrich realistic grammars of our languages, and cross-linguistic description of comparable practices of organizing talk in interaction will be invaluable for the study of both inter-European and international communication.
This volume is a collection of current work at the interface of linguistics and conversation analysis. The focus is on linguistic items in their action contexts: syntactic structures and lexical items in data from natural conversations in six European languages: Danish, English, Finnish, German, Italian and Swedish. Some of the studies deal with similar practices in two different languages, which enables cross-linguistic comparisons. The notion of 'construction' is brought together with an interactional perspective; the fact that constructions cannot always be clearly analysed as either syntactic or lexico-semantic has its reflection in this volume.
So far, there have been fewer attempts at interactionally oriented work on lexical and semantic phenomena than on syntactic constructions. In this volume, several papers show the interactional relevance of word selection and lexical semantic issues. In the future, studies on syntax and lexico-semantics in interaction will enrich realistic grammars of our languages, and cross-linguistic description of comparable practices of organizing talk in interaction will be invaluable for the study of both inter-European and international communication.
This monograph provides a micro-analytic description of the structure and communicative use of syntactic pivot constructions in German. Using the methodology of Conversation Analysis, this work shows that pivots emerge in interaction in response to local communicative needs.
Exclusively found in spoken German, pivots allow a speaker to extend an utterance beyond a possible completion point in a syntactically and prosodically unobtrusive way. Speakers utilize this basic property to promote context-specific actions: managing boundaries of speakership, bridging sequential and topical junctures, and dealing with different types of interactional trouble.
Through a close examination of syntactic pivots as an interactional resource, this work shows that spoken linguistic structures can only be fully understood if we acknowledge the temporality of language and view grammar as usage-based and negotiable. This book thus contributes to a growing body of research at the intersection of grammar and interaction.
This study analyzes the syntactic positioning of 105 instances of the German word 'übrigens' (roughly translated into English as 'by the way' or 'incidentally'), as it occurs in a corpus of written language and spontaneous everyday conversation. Whereas theoretically, 'übrigens' can be placed in different sentence types, and within these sentence types in a large number of syntactic positions, the empirical analysis yields that in everyday conversation, 'übrigens' holds one main position in one type of sentence: the mid-field position in verb-second sentences. In terms of information structure an theme/rheme organization, 'übrigens' in mid-field position divides the sentence into two parts. The sentence part prior to übrigens is low in information and thematic content, whereas the sentence part immediately following 'übrigens' is topically more dense. In contrast to other positions, 'übrigens' in its mid-field position is not connected to abrupt topic shift.
Der Beitrag thematisiert dialektologische und konversationsanalytische Aspekte der Intonation der 'Weiterweisung' in spontansprachlichen Interviewdaten des Hamburgischen und Berlinischen. Als gesprächsorganisatorisches Mittel signalisiert Weiterweisung primär, dass ein Sprecher seinen Redebeitrag über mehr als eine Intonationseinheit fortführen will. In der Erforschung der linguistischen Funktionen der Intonation sind in der Phonetik/Phonologie seit den letzten 20 Jahren bedeutende Fortschritte gemacht worden. Insbesondere zur formalen Struktur von Intonationsverläufen, über ihre phonologische Beschreibung und Organisation sowie zum Zusammenspiel von Intonation und- Syntax sind grundlegende Untersuchungen vorgelegt worden. Die meisten dieser Studien basieren auf vorgelesenen, elizitierten oder konstruierten Sprachdaten, während natürliche Alltagskonversation einerseits und dialektal gefärbte Sprache andererseits weitgehend ausgespart bleiben. Diese methodischen Beschränkungen resultieren teilweise aus den technisch aufwendigen Analyseverfahren, die noch bis vor ca. 10 Jahren zur Verfügung standen, und die akustische Analyse von spontansprachlichem Material erschwerten. Zum anderen lag das Forschungsinteresse hauptsächlich darin, die exakte akustisch-phonetische Struktur von Intonationsverläufen zu erfassenInfolge der jüngsten rasanten Entwicklung auf dem Gebiet der digitalen Messverfahren lassen sich nun auch ohne spezielle technische Ausstattung valide akustisch-phonetische Untersuchungen der Grundfrequenz (F0) auch an spontansprachlichem Sprachmaterial durchführen. Aufbauend auf den Ergebnissen der linguistischen Intonationsforschung ist es nunmehr möglich, das Forschungsinteresse auf die Analysebereiche der prosodischen Organisation natürlicher Alltagsgespräche sowie auf die regionalsprachliche Variation auszuweiten.
Using a conversation analytic approach, this article presents a systematic analysis of the interactional use of the particle ok in the institutional setting of German business meetings. Through an examination of talk-in-interaction with a thorough description of relevant embodied actions, the author analyzes how meeting participants co-construct social roles by employing different uses of free-standing ok. More specifically, the author focuses on two different uses of free-standing ok in business meetings: ok with averted eye gaze and ok with maintained eye gaze. The author addresses the question of how the chairperson uses free-standing ok to accomplish different actions and to perform “doing-being-facilitator.” By describing where the chairperson looks while producing ok, I also discuss how the chair manages both the coordination of face-to-face interaction and the practical task of facilitating the progress of a meeting.
This book concerns particles that are used as responses in conversations. It provides much needed methodological tools for analyzing the use of response particles in languages, while its particular focus is Finnish. The book focuses on two Finnish particles, nii(n) and joo, which in some of their central usages have “yeah” and “yes” as their closest English counterparts. The two particles are discussed in a number of sequential and activity contexts, including their use as answers to yes-no questions and directives, as responses to a stance-taking by the prior speaker, and in the midst of an extended telling by the co-participant. It will be shown how there is a fine-grained division of labor between the particles, having to do with the epistemic and affective character of the talk and the continuation vs. closure-relevance of the activity. The book connects the
interactional usages of the particles with what is known about their historical origins, and in this fashion it is also of interest to linguists doing research on processes of grammaticalization and lexicalization.
Using conversation analytic methodology, in this article, we examine two prosodic variants of the German response token achja and their use in everyday interaction. Whereas achJA, with prosodic prominence (in form of higher amplitude) on the second syllable, is used to claim remembering of relevant but just now recalled information, achja, with prosodic prominence (in form of a pitch peak) on the first syllable, serves as a placeholder in sequential slots in which the speaker is not in a position to provide the just-now-relevant response. Thus, whereas a speaker may use achJA to establish prior independent access to interactionally relevant information and mark its retrieval, achja displays a significant lack of access to relevant sequential or contextual knowledge. Achja is regularly recognized as an insufficient response by the coparticipant and followed by turn and sequence expansions, whereas achJA is closing relevant. In this article, we also discuss the component tokens ach and ja separately and outline implications for the study of response tokens, translation practices, and of prosody in interaction.
Remarkably little is known in detail about the phonetics and phonology of naturally occurring conversational talk. Virtually nothing of interest is known of the interactional implications of particular kinds of phonetic events in everyday talk: in particular about the ways in which participants in talk deploy general phonetic resources to accomplish specific interactional tasks. This is in part a consequence of the tendency of recent research on the phonological aspect of discourse to limit itself to ‘intonation’ as an area of primary interest. This work has moved away from the type of phonological analysis, such as that of Halliday (1967), that states intonational systems in terms of grammatically defined units or sentence types. Workers such as Brazil (1975, 1978, 1981), Brown, Currie and Kenworthy (1981), and Coulthard and Brazil (1981) have pursued Bolinger's suggestion that the relationship between intonation and grammar is ‘casual not causal’ and have sought to relate ‘intonation’ to discourse categories rather than to grammatical ones. These, and similar attempts to deal with aspects of discourse phonology, have suggested some organizational features which traditional linguistic accounts have not dealt with. On the whole, however, these recent attempts have been less than satisfactory for one or more of the following reasons.(Received January 27 1986)
The notion of Turn-Constructional Unit (TCU) in
Conversation Analysis has become unclear for many researchers.
The underlying problems inherent in the definition of this
notion are here identified, and a possible solution is
suggested. This amounts to separating more clearly the
notions of TCU and Transition Relevance Place (TRP). In
this view, the TCU is defined as the smallest interactionally
relevant complete linguistic unit, in a given context,
that is constructed with syntactic and prosodic resources
within their semantic, pragmatic, activity-type-specific,
and sequential conversational context. It ends in a TRP
unless particular linguistic and interactional resources
are used to project and postpone the TRP to the end of
a larger multi-unit turn. This suggestion tries to spell
out some of the assumptions that the seminal work in CA
made in principle, but never formulated explicitly.