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Turn-taking in Applicant
Task D – Our answer
In general terms, Piffs speaks first and Lamb second in the majority
of exchanges. In turns 1-10, for example, Piffs produces the first greeting
and Lamb the matching response greeting, and then Piffs asks a series
of five questions which Lamb then answers. Lamb does ask a few questions
in turns 12-20, but he is still acceding to Piffs’ general conversational
drift. In 23-59 Lamb again mainly responds to the questions Piffs poses.
As he becomes more puzzled by the questions he has to resort to echo questions
(see turns 30-38) in order to try to understand the questions being asked
well enough to be able to answer them. But nonetheless, he is still occupying
the responding conversational position rather than the initiating one.
There are one or two places where the worm does at least attempt to turn.
For example in turns 40 and 44 Lamb appears to try to take the initiative
and exert some control over the conversation. But Piffs ruthlessly regains
control in every case.
Not surprisingly, because Piffs produces most of the inititations she
also controls the topic of talk throughout. Indeed, she changes the topic
very rapidly from turn 23 onwards, when the interrogation sequence starts.
The fact that she controls the conversation so ruthlessly, both in terms
of topic and initiation-response structure is another clear indication
of her extreme dominance over Lamb. From turn 31 onwards, Piffs’
questions are almost all related to sexual matters, and mainly to Lamb’s
attitude towards women. This suggests, via Grice’s maxim of relation,
that Piffs is exerting her extreme dominance over Lamb for gender-related
reasons – she wants to exert control over the opposite sex, of which
Lamb is the rather pusillanimous representative.
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