APPLIED LINGUISTICS

APPLIED LINGUISTICS

PERSONAL PAPER ASSIGNMENT

CLASS ING-C

BY:

TOMI WARDANA (14178077)

LECTURER: PROF. DR. HERMAWATI SYARIF, M.HUM

ENGLISH EDUCATION PROGRAM

GRADUATE PROGRAM

STATE UNIVERSITY OF PADANG

2014

TURN TAKING ANALYSES

Tomi Wardana / 14178077

Introduction

Communication is the foundation of all human being interaction. It conveying information through the exchange of ideas, feelings, intentions, attitudes, expectations, perceptions or commands, as by speech, non-verbal gestures, writings, behavior and possibly by other means. It is significance for us to make communication become more effective. The method in which we converse, spend interest and communicate with other people to become in a position to make much more efficient, effective together with substantial discussions. One of aspect that should become our attention in communication is about turn taking.

B. Turn TakingTurn-taking refers to the process by which people in a conversation decide who is to speak next. It begins with one person speaking, and continues as the speaker gives up control to the next person. The second speaker now has the conversational floor. When the speaker is finished, they give control back to another speaker. Turn taking can be used in investigating how physical properties of speaking and silence contribute to conversational events.This study is an analysis of a corpus that contains conversations between

Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974) observed a number of characteristics in conversation, among them: Variable turn order and size; variable distribution of turns; overlapping is common, but brief; and overlapping is promptly repaired (when two parties find themselves speaking at the same time, one of them will stop). Given these characteristics, it is obvious, according to Sacks et al., that turn-allocation techniques are being used. The current speaker may select a different next speaker, or either party may self-select. This paper is concerned with those turn-allocation techniques that are obviously present.

C. Discussion

According to Edelsky (1981), turn definitions can be grouped in two main camps: Mechanical and interactional (see also Furo 2001). The first group treats turns as units of talk in interaction, without taking into account social context. In this group are studies by Jaffe and Feldstein (1970) and Duncan and Fiske (1985), because for them the turn merely consists of talk with an end boundary. Turns are attributed to a single speaker and are defined in terms of the behaviour of other parties in the conversation (a turn ends when somebody else claims the floor). Goffman (1981) says that a turn is the opportunity to hold the floor, not necessarily what is said while holding it.

On the other hand, interactional definitions are concerned with what happens during the interaction, and take into consideration the intention of the turn taker. Edelsky (1981) points out that speakers are more concerned with completing topics than structural units. Therefore, she defines turn as instances of on-record speaking, with the intention of conveying a message. She also differentiates turn and floor, since it is often difficult to determine who has the floor, such as situations where a turn is constructed collaboratively by more than one speaker. The floor is the activity taking place or the topic being discussed, often done in collaboration. Hayashi (1991) expands on this definition of floor, describing it as a means of orientation to the communication at the higher level of conversation structure.

In this paper, the writer define a turn as continuous talk by one speaker, uninterrupted by the other speaker. There may be talk by the other speaker, but that is often in the form of backchannel signals, which do not constitute instances of turn change. In Example (1), speaker FJCD continues her turn after speaker FLNB has uttered a ya (I see). This backchannel is delivered in overlap with part of speakers FJCD turn, which continues after the backchannel. Therefore, the two parts constitute a single turn

Turn-taking signals

The study of conversational organization has always assumed that there are ways in which speakers communicate the desire to yield, take, or maintain the floor. Sacks et al. (1974) assumed that such signals exist, although they did not discuss any particular signal. Later research has concentrated on a number of different signals: Discourse markers, pauses and silence, pitch, and intonation. Of importance are also the syntactic and semantic characteristics of the turn so far, i.e., whether the message can be constructed as a complete one from a syntactic or semantic point of view.

This following conversation is taken from a class in SMU 5 Padang:

Teacher:What is your hope for the next? Iya... What is your hope you are

studying now, what is your hope?

Student: Success

Teacher: Success. Thats good. What about you Sherly?

Student: Ingin maju

Teacher: oke.. My hope for the next I want to be succes in my studying for instance. I want to be an engineer for instance. I want to be a doctor. That is your hope. It is possible for you to get it? possible for you to get it? Yes.. If you study..? Study?

Student: Study hard

Teacher: Hard. That right Bryan. Good.

D. Conclusion and Suggestion

The research into turn-taking signals is useful in itself. We want to understand how conversational participants signal to each other that they desire to yield or take the turn. But it has many other applications, one of them the design of intelligent conversational agents. The virtual real estate agent needs to know when and how to yield and take the turn, using not only verbal cues, but also gesture and posture. The nonverbal cues were also important in building trust with the virtual agent. References

Duncan, Starkey, and Donald W. Fiske (1985) Interaction Structure and Strategy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Goodwin, Charles (1981) Conversational Organization: Interaction between Speakers and Hearers. New York: Academic Press.

Heritage, John (1984) A change-of-state token and aspects of its sequential placement. In J.M. Atkinson and J. Heritage (eds.), Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 299-345