Analysing the interactional turn-taking function of word elongation at syntactic boundaries

“the biggest differences I’ve noticed so far is (0.7) just like money:: and the way people .” Certain features of prosody, such as rising intonation to indicate a question, have been widely researched. One feature less widely explored is word elongation at syntactic unit boundaries, namely, the final words of clauses, and conjunctions following clauses – despite this subtle and discrete linguistic feature being a common occurrence and appearing to play a fundamental role in everyday talk. Just as rising intonation during an utterance largely projects a sequentially implicated answer, word elongation has conversational implications also. Based on a substantial collection (currently over 170 cases) in talk between university students meeting for the first time, it seems to aid in the construction of the shapes of sentences and thereby aids in the distribution of turns. More specifically, word elongation appears to serve two main, yet paradoxically contrasting functions: signaling that a turn is finished and therefore indicating speaker change, and conversely, signaling that a turn is in progress and therefore not indicating speaker change. This paper draws on the work of Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974) and Lerner (1991) on the underlying general principles of sentence construction and turn-taking in conversation in order to explicate how word elongation might integrate with the overall ongoing syntactic structure in the organisation of progressing interactive turns at talk.