Turn-taking in Applicant
Task E – Our answer
These are the two longest turns in the sketch, by far, foregrounding
them.
After the rapid question-and-answer phase of turns 23-39, Lamb tries
to exert some conversational control in 40). Piffs immediately slaps Lamb
down in turn 41 by asking a string of 24 questions without giving him
the chance to answer any of them. As the turn unfolds, the questions become
more and more elliptical. This pattern is highly deviant (and so foregrounded)
in adjacency-pair turn-taking terms, and we can infer from it, via Grice’s
maxim of relation, that Piffs has no real interest in Lamb’s answers.
The questions are all about how Lamb feels, and are often sexual in nature.
Turn 58 exhibits a similar foregrounded pattern. This time there are
21 questions without the chance for Lamb to answer. All the questions
are elliptical, depending on the question in turn 57 for their interpretation,
and they are all about women. The implicature (parallel to the one in
turn 41) that Piffs has no real interest in Lamb’s answers to her
questions is reinforced by the fact that her last five questions in this
turn have no real content. Throughout the turn, Piffs’ questions
are typically noun phrases with the structure ‘“their”
+ head noun’. But in the last five questions the head nouns are
replaced by noises.
If we now look at the turn-taking structure overall, we can see that
all of the five areas we have examined in Tasks A-E indicate Piffs’
conversational control over Lamb. In Tasks D and E we have also begun
to see how pragmatic interpretation of some of the turn-taking phenomena
we have noticed lead us to infer that the reason for Piffs’ extreme
behaviour is probably to make a rather clear point about male/female relations.
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