THE ORCHESTRATION OF DIALOGUE: A LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF HESITATION AND TURN-TAKING
Keywords:
Hesitation, turn-taking, disfluency, conversation analysis, pragmatics, psycholinguistics, discourse analysis, prosody, pause, filled pause, sequential organization.Abstract
Spontaneous spoken interaction is characterized by its dynamic and collaborative nature, largely governed by the intricate mechanisms of hesitation and turn-taking. While distinct in their primary functions, these phenomena are profoundly intertwined, shaping the rhythm, coherence, and informational flow of conversation. Hesitation, manifesting as filled pauses ('um', 'uh'), unfilled pauses (silence), repetitions, and false starts, primarily reflects cognitive processes of speech planning and word retrieval, but also serves crucial discourse functions like turn-holding or signaling uncertainty. Turn-taking, conversely, refers to the systematic organization of speaker alternation, governed by a set of context-sensitive rules that manage the allocation of the conversational 'floor' at Transition Relevance Places (TRPs). This essay provides a comprehensive linguistic analysis, differentiating the core definitions of hesitation and turn-taking, exploring their acoustic and functional characteristics, and critically examining their synergistic relationship in managing conversational flow. Furthermore, it discusses cross-linguistic and cultural variations in their manifestations, underscoring their universal yet culturally modulated role in facilitating efficient and meaningful human communication.
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