LingLunch : J. Ginzburg & A. Lücking

Jonathan Ginzburg & Andy Lücking
Turn Taking Deconstructed

Ever since Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson’s seminal 1974 paper turn taking has been assumed to be one of the defining organizing principles of conversation, summarized by the slogan *no gap, no overlap*. However, this assumption is based on a uni-modal view of conversation, based exclusively on speech. Once one considers conversation from a multi-modal perspective, one notices that interlocutors are co-active for much of the time. In this talk we sketch a music-inspired and dialogue-based semantic framework which construes multimodal natural language use as *polyphonic interaction* on multiple tiers. Much of the motivation for this is to account for the co-presence of message-carrying signals emanating from head movements (shaking, nodding, tilting), eyebrows (frowns), eyes (gaze), mouth (laughter, smiles), and pointing (generally hands, but also head) and of course speech. But ultimately this turns out to be important even for dealing with interaction restricted to speech, where there is plenty of evidence for normative instances of communicative overlap.