Note that in conversations with two participants the number of turns will be roughly equal for each speaker, no matter what the power relation. This is why we asked you to imagine a conversation with at least three speakers.
A turn is a period of talk by one participant which is usually bounded by turns by other participants or a significant period of silence. Turns may have one sentence or more. They can be ended voluntarily - a speaker can relinquish a turn - or by an interruption by someone else.
Many conversations just involve people taking turns. But sometimes one speaker acts like a ring-master, telling the other speakers when they can contribute and when they should stop. This is called turn-allocation. Chat show hosts perform this function, as do teachers in class.
Although many people make a distinction between talking and doing, it is arguable that talking is also doing. 'Speech act' is the term that philosophers and linguists use to describe actions performed through speech (sometimes with accompanying appropriate non-linguistic actions). Obvious examples of speech acts would be threatening, apologising, surrendering, christening, and explaining.
It is worth noting that three particular speech acts are conventionally associated with the three grammatical sentence-structure forms that are often used to realise them:
Speech Act | Grammatical structure |
---|---|
Command |
Imperative |
Question |
Interrogative |
Statement |
Declarative |
Indeed, these particular speech act labels and the sentence-structure labels are often used by non-linguists as synonyms for one another (this always puzzled Mick Short when he was at school: he couldn't understand why his French teacher used two terms for the same thing). But if we think about it a bit harder we can see (a) that there are many, many speech act labels and only a small number of basic sentence-structure labels and (b) that some speech acts might take more than one sentence and some take less than one. And if we look a bit more closely, we can also see that the fit between the above three pairs of terms is not that good really. For example, we can easily find commands and questions which have declarative structures ('You can get up now.', 'Mick came to the party wearing a dress?!'), the speech act of suggesting often has an interrogative structure ('Should we go now?') and expressions of concern often have imperative structures ('Try to eat a bit more.').
We don't have time now to go more deeply into the analysis of speech acts, but it is worth noting that speech act designations usually involve taking context into account as well as linguistic form, and that sometimes different people might accord the same utterance different speech act statuses depending upon their different contextual assumptions (e.g. 'It's hot in here' could be seen as a remark by one person (a visitor), a criticism by another (the person responsible for the state of the room) and a request to open the window (by the person standing next to the window).
Assessing whether or not a topic has been changed in a conversation is not so easy as you might think at first sight. Very distinct topic changes are obvious enough, but often the changes are more gradual, and may look like different aspects of the same topic. So, when you think about topic change in conversations, make sure that you are comparing like with like.