Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

504 Part 6: Language and Interaction
So what in fact happens? Deb produces the correction, ‘everybody:ststill
here.’, without releasing the turn after ‘just great’. Sounds like the last
consonant in ‘great’ can be produced either with or without a release of
air. Here, rather than produce this last sound (aspiration) of the last segment
(‘t’) of the last word (‘great’) of this turn unit, Deb moves immediately
into the fi rst sound of ‘everybody’. So, one resource for talking
through a possible completion is to withhold the production of the actual
completion of the TCU and instead move directly into the next component
of the turn. In this way a speaker can talk in such a way that a projectable
point of completion never actually occurs. Here is another example that I
noted in passing. This happened in a faculty meeting and the person was
talking about the administration of a large university:
(8) They always try to do tha- it’s- it’s just the way that they work.
Here the speaker is clearly coming to a point of possible completion
with ‘that’ but manages to avoid this by never actually producing the last
sound of the word, substituting instead the fi rst sound of the next turn
unit. Returning to the example with Deb and Dick, we can see that Deb
uses this practice to get two relevant tasks done in a single turn-at-talk
without risking the possibility of Dick self-selecting at the fi rst possible
completion. We thus have some interactional motivation for this compressed
transition space. Moreover, we can see that the organization of
action into sequences, the organization of talk into turns (and into TCUs)
and the organization of talk into an overall structure do not operate independently
of one another. Although we can think of these heuristically as
semi-autonomous organizations, in practice they are thoroughly interdigitated.
This is what I mean when I say the utterance (or the turn-at-talk) is
a product of multiple, intersecting, concurrently operative organizations
of practice or machineries.
CA necessarily begins with the detailed analysis of a single instance of
interaction – this is what we refer to as ‘case-by-case’ analysis and it means
taking each instance on its own terms, trying to get a handle on its singularity
and what the participants were doing in that case and what practices
they were using to accomplish those outcomes. This is a fundamental
and irreducible aspect of the conversation analytic method but, in order to
develop a formal account of some particular practice or phenomenon, it
must be complemented by a view across instances based on a collection.
Research Methods in Conversation Analysis
In this section, I will discuss the use of collections in CA. After the
detailed analysis of some particular instance has generated a set of promising
observations about a possibly researchable phenomenon, the conversation
analyst must set about building a collection of cases since it is