This article provides an overview of conversation analytic research that investigates the phenomenon of interlocutors "finishing each other's sentences," termed "collaborative completion, in everyday conversation. The objective is twofold: (1) by reporting on research that examines the formal features and the social actions of…

Theoretically speaking, semantic minimalism and semantic maximalism are two current dominant assumptions on the nature of meaning in the linguistic communication. The former lays more emphasis on the syntactic basis of sentence meaning, while the latter stresses much over the pragmatic properties of utterance meaning. This paper, grounded on the…

The paper is focused on the study of the interconnection of context and evaluative utterances in French. The assessment of different aspects of the world is viewed as a considerable part of human cognitive activities. Considering this, in the paper evaluative utterances are analysed in relation to logical, semantic, pragmatic and communicative…

There is an ongoing debate whether phenomena of disfluency (such as filled pauses) are produced communicatively. Clark and Fox Tree ("Cognition" 84(1):73-111, 2002) propose that filled pauses are words, and that different forms signal different lengths of delay. This paper evaluates this Filler-As-Words hypothesis by analyzing the…

Communicative alignment refers to adaptation to one's communication partner. Temporal aspects of such alignment have been little explored. This article examines temporal aspects of lexical and syntactic alignment (i.e., tendencies to use the interlocutor's lexical items and syntactic structures) in task-oriented discourse. In particular, we…

Conversation Analysis (CA) has established repair (Schegloff, Jefferson & Sacks 1977; Schegloff 1979; Kitzinger 2013) as a conversational mechanism for managing contingencies of talk-in-interaction. In this dissertation, I look at a particular sort of "repair" termed TCU-continuations (or otherwise known increments in other…

Purpose: Few tools are available to examine the narrative speaking ability of adolescents. Hence, the authors designed a new narrative task and sought to determine whether it would elicit a higher level of syntactic complexity than a conversational task in adolescents with typical language development. Method: Forty adolescents (M[subscript age] =…

This article explores the viability of the analytic distinction between "turn-constructional unit (TCU) continuation" (i.e., continuing a turn beyond a point of possible completion with grammatically dependent material) and "new TCU" (i.e., continuing a turn with grammatically independent material) when hypotactic clause combinations are involved.…

This dissertation takes an ethnomethodologically-grounded, conversation-analytic approach in investigating the sequential deployment of linguistic resources in Spanish-language talk-in-interaction. Three sets of resources are examined: 2nd-person singular reference forms (tú, vos, usted), indicative/subjunctive verbal mood selection, and…

This research examines students' use of African American English (AAE) in classrooms with varying levels of procedural and substantive engagement. In this study, classroom context is examined for type of engagement, turn length, and teacher response to student AAE use. Student AAE use is analyzed by ethnicity, gender, and teacher, and by features…

Dynamic and interactive uses of personal pronouns are usually not as neat as traditional grammar describes in that the first and second person pronoun index speakers and addressees in a speech event. Devoted to a prevalent feature of Mandarin Chinese conversation--the switch of the first person singular pronoun "wo", "I", and the second person…

Depending on the demands of a particular communicative situation, bilingual or multilingual speakers ("bilingualism-multilingualism") will switch between language varieties. Code-switching is the practice of moving between variations of languages in different contexts. In an educational context, code-switching is defined as the practice…

Grammar in natural interaction is an emergent, dynamic and adaptive system that is consistently subject to change. It is understood as a collection of open multiple subsystems, each of which is activated as the language users recurrently participate in a particular linguistic, interactional and social activity. When a certain linguistic form or…

This dissertation explores co-construction of a situated activity in a current unit by mainly focusing on hearers' actions. The "co-construction" involves a process of interaction in which speakers and hearers jointly construct the form and the meaning of ongoing utterances even when they disagree with each other (Jacoby & Ochs,…

The present study adds to our understanding of how learners employ lexical and grammatical phenomena to communicate in writing in different types of interlanguage discourse. A multidimensional (factor) analysis of a corpus of L2 Spanish writing (202,241 words) generated by second- and third-year, university-level learners was performed. The…