Formal aspects of collaborative productions in English conversation

In recognition of the enthusiasm he has brought to all aspects of the study of spoken verbal interaction, we dedicate this series to Professor Dr. Collaboration between speakers on different linguistic levels is one of the basic conditions for functioning talk-in-interaction. In this paper the notion of interactional collaboration is taken up with respect to conversationalists' deployment of syntax and prosody. The phenomenon under discussion is the collaborative production of syntactic constructions and prosodic units by two speakers. The following investigation will attempt to categorize collaborative productions according to some of their formal characteristics. In addition, it will be claimed that collaborative productions are non-competitive incomings into the turn-space of another speaker and cannot be considered interruptions. In the conversation-analytic tradition collaborative productions were first mentioned by Sacks (1995) under the term "collaboratively built sentences ". They also receive a brief mentioning in Schegloff (1984) and are part of what Falk (1980) treats under the heading of "duets". The the phenomenon "sentences-in-progress. " Ferrara (1992) speaks of "joint productions " ; and in a section in Ono/Thompson (1995) they are treated as "co-constructions. " A brief summary of these positions will be helpful for a further understanding of the phenomenon. 1 Sacks (1995) sees the main contribution of collaborative productions to discourse as social. For him, the syntactic possibility of constructing a sentence together is at the same time a possibility for collaboratively constructing a social unit. The fact that there is a job that any person could clearly do by themself (sic), provides a resource for members for permitting them to show each other that whatever it is they're doing together, they're just doing together to do together. That is to say, if one wants to find a way of showing somebody that what you want is to be with them, the best way to do it is to find some way of dividing a task which is not easily dividable, and which clearly can be done by either one alone. (1995:147) 1 Another piece of recent work that has dealt with collaboratives is Díaz, Antaki and Collins (1996). It is concerned with collaborative productions in circumstances too specific to be considered in the present general overview, namely with the " collective formulation (...) of a problem solution on a joint footing " (1996:525). Collaborative productions are also briefly treated in Hartung (1998) as a way of being ironic, …