Collaborative Turns in Italian talk-in-interaction: collaboration, temporality, and emergent grammar

Description

Collaborative Turns in Italian talk-in-interaction:
collaboration, temporality, and emergent grammar
Virginia Calabria (KU Leuven/Université de Neuchâtel) & Maria Eleonora Sciubba (Tilburg University)

In this research, we provide an account of Collaborative Turns (CTs) in Italian talk-in-interaction. CTs is an umbrella term for two phenomena that have recently been grouped together in the literature (Luke, 2021): 1) Co-constructions (Lerner, 1991), whereby a speaker (A) utters a turn-in-progress projecting more to come (Auer, 2005), and a co-interactant (B) provides a candidate contribution designed to either continue or complete A’s turn, fulfilling a projected grammatical and actional trajectory with integrated syntactic material; 2) Other-extensions, whereby a speaker (A) utters a potential grammatically, pragmatically, and prosodically complete turn (Selting, 2000), but a co-interactant (B) extends the prior turn, in grammatically dependent ways, re-occasioning the end of the turn, a transition relevance place (TRP).
Deploying Conversation Analysis (Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson, 1974) and Interactional Linguistics (Couper-Kuhlen & Selting, 2018), we take an approach to the phenomena that considers together the grammatical design of the turns, the prosodic realization (continuative/final prosody, hesitations, etc.), body orientation (the role of gaze), actional fittedness of turns, and temporality (how a contribution is timed to be heard as collaborative: if it is provided in overlap with the host turn; or a pause between the host turn and the contribution occurs; or it is provided after other-talk, etc.). We analyze a 12 hours corpus of video data of multiperson interactions (3 -5 participants) in Italian, recorded in different settings (informal dinners; formal business meetings). We transcribed it following Jefferson’s (2004) and Mondada’s (2018) conventions, and found 185 instances of CTs. The syntactic dimension of our analysis belongs to Emergent Grammar (Hopper, 2011), that conceptualizes the temporal unfolding of linguistic units in spoken language as the outcome of an interactive enterprise carried out by speakers who monitor each other’s productions (cf. Goodwin, 1979).
Collaborative Turns have been described as sophisticated examples of coordinated behavior (Bolden, 2003) and an obvious testimony (Auer, 2009) to this collaborative syntactical work that speakers do. Interactants are engaged in a constant analysis of each other’s turn constructional units in real time (Auer, 2009), which allows them to foresee the potential end of a turn, a TRP. While holding the floor, speakers project possible grammatical and actional trajectories of their talk, deploying specific grammatical formats and resources (e.g., starting a turn with an if-clause gives indications that a then-clause may follow; cf. Lerner, 1991). Co-interactants, either by being selected as next speaker (e.g., by being addressed, or gazed at) or by self-selecting, can collaboratively contribute to the current/prior speaker’s turn. In order for their contributions to be treated as collaborative – namely as continuing, extending or (re)completing a turn – and not as competing for the floor, co-interactants time them precisely, deploy syntactical material that makes their turn grammatically integrated with prior talk, fulfil co-speakers’ actional trajectories, and orient to gaze conduct to display common orientation to the same recipients or invite a contribution.
We illustrate how co-interactants combine turns to implement a variety of specific actions, e.g., co-constructing a speaker’s turn to enhance their voice, forming a party with a co-interactant to display shared knowledge and expertise on a topic, turning a story into a laughable, extending a complete turn to add a missing piece of information, managing a delicate disagreement, etc. Thus, we show how collaboration is an interplay of grammatical choices, temporal placement of the turns and embodied conduct, and is therefore an interactional achievement.
From an acquisitional perspective, this study contributes to the literature on the acquisition of interactional competence (Biazzi, 2009, 2011; Orletti, 2004, 2007), giving insights on the kind of structures and functions of co-constructed collaborative turns which are often found in native/non-native spontaneous interactions (Biazzi, 2009, 2011; Orletti, 2007).

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Period	18 Jul 2023
Event title	AILA World Anniversary Congress 2023
Event type	Conference
Location	Lyon, FranceShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International