Journal Articles

Marking the Turn: Obligation, Engagement, and Alienation in Group Discussions

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In group conversations, not speaking is the state of affairs experienced by most people most of the time; I refer to this as “conversational latency.” Hypothesizing that conversational latency affects one’s discursive options, I analyze the association between latency (operationalized as the number of turns that elapsed since the current speaker last spoke) and turn-initial words (e.g., but, oh) in twenty-nine experimental task groups, taking turn-initial words as indicators of the type of content a speaker proposes to produce. The findings suggest a model of group conversation in which conversational obligations weigh heaviest on the shoulders of the most recent contributors; those who contributed somewhat less recently remain engaged but have more latitude to take discordant positions; and those who have been quiet for longer periods are susceptible to “alienation from topic,” as a result of which reentry is often accompanied by an attempt to change the topic.

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Detail Information

Series Title

Social Psychology Quarterly

Call Number

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Publisher

: sage publisher., 2010

Collation

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Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

01902725

Classification

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Content Type

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Media Type

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Edition

Vol. 73 no. 2 June 2010. pp. 132-151

Subject(s)

Conversation
Turn-taking
Discourse makers
Task group

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