Abstract
Containing 10 empirical papers grounded in conversation analysis and interactional linguistics (CA/IL), this valuable volume treats central issues for the transcription and analysis of talk and embodied action – issues of analytic units and unit boundaries. I will focus on two themes I find running through the volume: (1) the primacy of boundaries, of varying strength, over units, and (2) the limits of syntax, or other linguistic concepts, for identifying, projecting, and analyzing units and boundaries.
While stating ‘that discarding units altogether may be too radical’ (p. 97), Barth-Weingarten demonstrates the primacy of prosodic boundaries over prosodic units. These boundaries, or cesuras, are fuzzy, with the strength of candidate cesuras being gradient. Such a view is supported in Barnwell’s chapter, which takes an unusual (for CA/IL) approach of asking untrained listeners about their perceptions of prosodic boundaries. Barnwell finds regularity in where such listeners perceive prosodic boundaries, While Barnwell finds regularity in where such listeners perceive prosodic boundaries, he also notes points in the speech stream where there is disagreement. He also finds that trained transcribers may include a prosodic boundary in a transcript ‘which subjects either disagree about, or … agree are not boundaries’ (p. 144). This indicates that possible prosodic boundaries can vary in strength and that training in transcription may result in the transcriber becoming overly sensitive to such boundaries. Ogden and Walker also investigate speech sounds and show how various resources can be used to mark both turn and sequence boundaries. An interesting finding is that the social action of offer (and, I suspect, other ‘speech acts’) does not have direct phonetic exponents. ‘This makes the category “offer” different from e.g., “starting a new sequence,” “designing a turn for an affiliative next turn,” “marking something as misplaced,” “upgrading something in a prior turn,” which have been shown to have direct phonetic exponents’ (p. 307). There are thus different orders of action, with some actions being more directly involved in the construction of boundaries and relationships between different units.
Units and unit boundaries are, of course, tightly interrelated. As stated by Raymond, ‘each unit has an internal organization with recognizable beginnings that can be linked in various ways to their recognizable (possible) completions’ (p. 171). In addition, as Raymond shows, different types of units (i.e. turns, turn construction units (TCUs) and ‘slots’, a term that refers to two different parts of an answer turn – one which responds to the grammatical form of the question and another which responds to the action conveyed by the question) are not necessarily congruent – two slots, for example, can be found within one TCU or multiple TCUs can be used to construct the action relevant for one slot. In addition to being constructed of subunits at a different level of organization, a unit (e.g. a TCU) may cross boundaries that are irrelevant for it but relevant for a different type of unit (e.g. a slot). Deciding what constitutes a unit is not straightforward. In partial contrast with Raymond, Steensig and Heinemann treat an answer to certain types of yes/no question which contains both a confirmation and an expansion as forming a single unit. Returning to Barth-Weingarten’s point that it would be too radical to discard units, participants do not orient solely to boundaries. As shown by Reed and Szczepek Reed in their analyses of teachers’ verbal instruction between student performances, as part of music masterclasses, ‘[i]n orienting to the beginning, middle and end of instructions, participants show us that they are treating the instructional project as a unit-like whole’ (p. 331).
As shown in several chapters, resources used to construct different types of units and their boundaries are not limited to linguistic resources. Li, for example, shows how changes in sitting posture are ‘related to the initiation and completion of [a] multi-TCU turn’ (p. 353), while Iwasaki as well as Ford, Fox and Thompson show the importance of gaze and gesture for the construction and projection of units and their boundaries. This leads to the second theme mentioned earlier, the limits of syntax, or other linguistic concepts, for identifying, projecting, and analyzing either units or boundaries. As Linell puts it, ‘participants … are concerned with content and expression, rather than building grammatical products’ (p. 74). He also, though, sees a necessity for linguistic concepts in the analysis of units, stating that units ‘generate and fulfil projections that are due to syntactic dependencies’ (p. 62). Ford, Fox and Thompson take a more radical approach, describing trajectories of action-in-interaction without reliance on ‘epiphenomena that linguists call grammatical units’ (p. 40).
One chapter that I have difficulty with is Iwasaki’s chapter on interactive turn spaces. While she shows well how, in Japanese, some kind of response can be made relevant at certain points prior to the completion of what comes to be a complete sentence, at what she terms an intervention relevance place, she also states that this is done prior to the completion of the current TCU. The difficulty is that the sole basis for claiming that such intervention relevance places occur while the current TCU is still in progress seems to be sentential syntax. That is, Iwasaki seems to rely on syntax to identify the boundaries of TCUs. It is questionable, however, whether sentential syntax can be relied on to mark possible TCU completion in Japanese. Li, for example, argues that because Mandarin ‘does not have morphological markings for syntactic relations’ (p. 369), syntax is of limited usefulness for constructing or projecting possible turn completion. While Japanese does use morphology to mark syntactic relations, it has been described as involving delayed projectability, and, in comparison with English, sentential syntax is not as strong a resource for projection of turn completion. In their influential model of turn-taking, Sacks et al. (1974) rely heavily on the syntax of English for the description of what a TCU is. I wonder, though, if this might be a result of working with English materials and that perhaps English syntax is an unusually strong resource for the projection of turn completion, in comparison with syntax in other languages. One contribution this volume makes to CA/IL is to show how it is possible, perhaps even necessary, to move beyond reliance on such linguistic concepts in the analysis of interaction.