Interaction structure

An English vernacular speaker knows that it can often be embarrassing in the English society to be together with someone and not talk to them. This is because language, besides being means of communicating information, is also an important factor of establishing and maintaining relationships with other people. Young children have to learn not only the pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary of their language; they also have to learn how to use the language in conversa­tional interaction in order to be able to establish social relationships and participate in two-way communication.

Different verbal and nonverbal signals used in conversation have been studied, and the functions of such factors as gaze, gesture, tone of voice are analyzed in social interaction studies. Therefore social interaction may consist of closely related sequences of nonverbal signals and verbal utterances.

Among the theoretical models developed to describe the nature of social behaviour, stimulus–response reaction has been generally found helpful but incomplete. Other scholars see social behaviour as a kind of motor skill that is goal-directed and modified by response, while other models have been based on the theory of games, which emphasizes the pursuit and exchange of rewards and has led to experiments based on laboratory games.

An obvious aspect of the struc­ture of conversations is that they are based on the principle of turn-taking, and are organized in such a way as to ensure that only one speaker speaks at a time. In a conversation between two people, each speaker, obviously enough, takes a turn alternatively; but note that a speaker's 'turn' bestows (даровать) not only the right but also the obligation to speak. If someone were reporting a conversation between certain John and Mary, he might say of ‘one point offered by John and then stop… because Mary didn't answer anything'. However, it was Mary's turn to speak, but she kept silent. That is why she is the one who seemed to have broken the rules of conversation.

There are also moments in the structure of conversation where it is possible, and moments where it is not possible, to interrupt a speaker. And there are 'rules', too, about how and when one is allowed to introduce a new topic into conversation. There are even 'rules' about silence! It has been said that, in a conversation between two English speakers who are not close friends, a silence of longer than about four seconds is considered not civilized. It means that people become embarrassed if nothing is said during that time. They feel obliged to say something, even if this something is only a remark about the weather. Many of these 'rules' can in fact be broken. We say 'I'm sorry to interrupt', 'On a completely different topic', 'To go back to what we were talking about before', 'Just let me think about that for a minute', and so on, and so forth.

Another big problem is listening in relation to speaking. Context analysis and the study of numerous tape-recordings led the researchers to look at the verbal and nonverbal behavior together. Such analyses make it seem as if in an ordinary conversation it is each individual's successive turn at speaking catches the action. But that tells only part of the story. When we engage ourselves in a conversation, we do not just utter little speeches one after another, as in a debate; much more is going on interactionally in the situation considered as a whole. A very important component in what is going on is listening, considered not just as a passive reception of infor­mation but as a communicative interaction that is itself informative to the participants in the event.

When the researcher views an audio-visual record carefully, especially in a slow motion, he is impressed by the mutuality of all the partners engaged in interaction. In the process of speech listeners are not just doing noth­ing, they do not "switch off" when they are not speaking. Rather, listeners are very active in the scene — they may be gazing at the speaker or at some object in the scene to which the speaker is referring, they may be nodding or changing facial expression while listening. Listeners may be speaking while the primary speaker is talking. They utter brief "back channel" comments that show attention (e.g., in American English, "h-m*, "yeah"), or even speak out full clauses that overlap the talk of the primary speaker.

The cultural organization of social participation structure in conversation is an issue of pedagogical significance, since some classroom participation frameworks may be more or less familiar to students, depending upon the frameworks they are accustomed to in their daily life outside school.

Schegloff, and Jefferson argue that speaker change is a basic conversational process and that turn-taking mechanisms are organized about transition relevance places, which determine when a next speaker can take the floor. But they give no data on how such transition relevance places are signalled. Conversations, unlike sentences, do not come ready-made. Speaker and listener must be ready with verbal signs to determine when to take turns without interfering with oth ers' rights.

Another process of key importance for conversational inference is the signalling of utterance prominence to indicate which of several bits of information is to be highlighted or placed in focus. In the English rhetorical tradition this is done partly through syntax and lexical choice and partly through placement of prosodie accent. Given a particular choice of words, we have certain expectations about normal accent placement. These, however, can then be systematically violated to convey additional information not clearly given in the message.

A final signalling cue of relevance (намек уместности) here is the choice of discourse strategy. The following example of a brief recorded exchange between two secretaries in a small university office serves to organize a discussion of relevant interpretive processes given by Humperz.

1. A: Are you going to be here for ten minutes?

2. B: Go ahead and take your break. Take longer if you want.

3. A: I'll just be outside on the porch. Call if you need me.

4. B: OK. Don't worry.

Note that A could have achieved her end by simply asking Can I take my break?, in which case a simple one-word or one-phrase answer like Yes or OK would have been sufficient to complete the exchange. But given her choice of words, and the experience with similar situations tells us that more talk is preferable and naturally expected.

This discussion suggests that conversational inference is best seen not as a simple evaluation of intent but as involving a complex series of judgments, including relational or contextual assessments on how items of information are to be integrated into what we know and into the event at hand, as well as the assessments of content and interaction.

Regardless of the participation structure, however, the listening activity of the auditors is always available to the speaker in the form of a certain feedback about how and what is being said. Thus, the audience feedback and the production of coherent discourse by the speakers are both: taking place in real time, and influencing one another continually as speaking and listening are being produced in interaction jointly.

Listening activity by the audience is one of the main ways in which the people in inter­action form environments for one another. This mutual influence is both simultaneous and successive. At the immediate moment of speaking, the speaker can see and hear what the auditors are doing — looking away, nodding, uttering a back-channel fragment and so on.

We can also observe that conversations consist of struc­tured sequences of different types of utterances. In most cases, for instance, conversations are organised in such a way that questions are followed by answers, as in:

Q: Have you written to John yet

A: No, not yet.

Q: Are you going to write⁷

A: Yes, eventually.

However, it is perfectly possible for question and answer sequences to be embedded in one another:

Q: Have you seen John yet^?

QA: Is he back?

Q: Didn't you know that?

A: No, I didn't.

A: He's back all right.

A: Well, I haven't seen him.

Like questions, summonses (обращения) are normally followed by answers:

Bill: John!

John: Coming!

The fact that a summons is normally followed by an answer may explain a rather odd fact, that in telephone conversations, it is usually the person who answers the telephone speaks first. From a purely common-sense point of view, it could be said that the caller has a far better idea of who is going to answer the phone than the answerer has of who is calling. Nevertheless, the answerer speaks first because the ringing of the telephone functions as a summons, which requires an answer, even if it is only 'hello'.

It is also possible, for adults, as native speakers of the language and skilled conversationalists, to distinguish between coherent sequences and random se­quences of utterances. No one should have much trouble distinguishing between the following:

A: Are you going on holiday this year?

B: I haven't got any money.

A: Are you going on holiday this year^?

B: My favourite colour is yellow.

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