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Speakers formulating their talk as interruptive

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journal contribution
posted on 2021-03-31, 02:55 authored by Ann Weatherall, DM Edmonds
© 2017 Elsevier B.V. Interruption has predominantly been conceptualised as a violation of normative turn-taking practices and speakership rights. The present study further develops a broader perspective by showing that speakers can orient to matters of sequential organisation, other than turn-taking, when they claim their own talk is interruptive. Drawing from a larger collection of 72 cases where explicit claims to interruption were made, this paper uses conversation analysis to examine a subset of 20 instances where speakers specifically described what they were doing was interruption. Our target phenomenon was expressions such as “I want to interrupt” and “apologise for interrupting”. Speakers can prospectively mark some upcoming talk as interruptive and they can also retrospectively cast what they have just said as an interruption. Either way, the observably relevant disruption was not to turn-taking but to other sequences of action, namely the proper order of activities, the organisation of topics and adjacency pairs. Furthermore, by focusing on cases from institutional settings we propose that by explicitly claiming one's own talk as interruptive participants make relevant membership categories and their associated deontic responsibilities for the progression of activities within institutional settings.

History

Preferred citation

Weatherall, A. & Edmonds, D. M. (2018). Speakers formulating their talk as interruptive. Journal of Pragmatics, 123, 11-23. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2017.11.008

Journal title

Journal of Pragmatics

Volume

123

Publication date

2018-01-01

Pagination

11-23

Publisher

Elsevier BV

Publication status

Published

ISSN

0378-2166

eISSN

1879-1387

Language

en