Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/34.3054

AUTHOR: Theresa Neumaier
TITLE: Conversation in World Englishes
SUBTITLE: Turn-Taking and Cultural Variation in Southeast Asian and Caribbean English
SERIES TITLE: Studies in English Language
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2023

REVIEWER: Marine Riou

SUMMARY

In this expanded and revised version of her PhD dissertation, Theresa Neumaier analyzes conversational patterns in five hours of audio-recorded face-to-face conversations in Southeast Asian English and Caribbean English. The book is situated at the intersection of Conversation Analysis (CA) and World Englishes, two areas of research which have rarely been combined before. The book investigates the mechanics and linguistic resources of turn-taking, focusing on the practices used for turn-claiming, turn-holding, and turn-yielding. Neumaier argues that Southeast Asian English and Caribbean English interactions exhibit the same overall mechanics of turn-taking observed in other varieties of English and other languages, therefore “support[ing] claims of a universal, context-free infrastructure underlying informal conversations” (p. 268). While the main findings highlight the similarities in the two datasets, some interesting differences are discussed. Southeast Asian conversations were found to feature more next-speaker selection, continuations, and active verbal turn-yielding, while Caribbean English conversations are described as exhibiting more self-selection, lapses, and longer overlaps. Regarding differences in the linguistic resources used, notable differences include clicks and slowing down during overlap in Southeast Asian English, and address terms, and recycles in Caribbean English. Overall, Neumaier argues that “although its basic system might be universal, turn-taking is essentially shaped by and adapted to the cultural and linguistic context it is situated in” (p. 270). One of the objectives of the book was to test empirically whether some previous claims about culturally-specific interactional styles can be observed. Neumaier’s choice of corpus was made in part for this reason, as her data involve “two speaker groups that have often been associated with very different interactional styles: Southeast Asia and the Caribbean. Southeast Asian interactions are often associated with ‘high context’ communication […], that is, speakers are said to put less emphasis on talk, as avoiding direct messages and as tolerating long silences. […] Caribbean conversations seem to be quite different: they are described as being marked by overlaps and interruptions” (p. 18) The book’s findings allow Neumaier to qualify this view by demonstrating that as far as turn-taking is concerned, these labels come nowhere near close to describing adequately conversations in Southeast Asian English and Caribbean English.

Section 1 (“Introduction”)

The short introduction presents the study and book structure. The following four research questions are laid out:
“(1) Does turn-taking in Southeast Asian and Caribbean English conversations generally follow the turn-taking framework described for Inner Circle Englishes?
(2) What are the different forms, contexts, and frequencies of turn allocation in Southeast Asian and Caribbean English conversations?
(3) Which strategies do Southeast Asian and Caribbean English speakers employ to claim or hold a turn at talk?
(4) Do the findings from questions (1) to (3) correspond to previous descriptions of Southeast Asian and Caribbean English ‘speaking styles’?” (p. 3)

Section 2 (“Investigating talk-in-interaction in culture”)
This section provides the necessary background that scholars of World Englishes (or variationist sociolinguistics more generally) and Conversation Analysis might be lacking about each other’s areas of expertise. Most of the conversation analytic research conducted on English data involves American English and British English, and research on World Englishes does not tend to use authentic interactional data and analyze it in situ. As stated in the Introduction, the author could identify only four journal articles on conversational patterns in World Englishes. One possible explanation she offers is profoundly epistemological. In Conversation Analysis “culture (or a certain ‘speaking style’) is not a priori given but manifested in and observable through speakers’ interactional behaviour, if conversationalists can be shown to orient to it” (p. 16). By contrast, “[r]esearch in World Englishes is rooted in sociolinguistic theory, thus having a completely different starting point: language is essentially seen as influenced by external factors, such as region, sociohistorical background, or identity” (p. 16).

Section 3 (“Codifying patterns of interaction”)
This section presents the data and methodology. Neumaier assembled two datasets of audio-recorded face-to-face conversations, taken from existing corpora: the Asian Corpus of English (ACE, Kirkpatrick et al., 2020) and the International Corpus of English (ICE, Schneider, 2017). In the 3 interactions taken from the ACE corpus, the participants come from China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Vietnam, they use English as a Lingua Franca, and they self-report as highly proficient in English. In the ICE corpus, the participants are native speakers of English, with 5 interactions coming from the Jamaican component of ICE, and 5 interactions from the Trinidad and Tobago component.

Neumaier combined the qualitative analysis of interactions in situ to a more quantitative approach involving systematic coding and mostly descriptive statistics. She transcribed the data in a detailed conversation analytic format and designed a systematic coding scheme based on close qualitative analysis and established CA research on turn-taking. Neumaier identified each transition-relevant place (TRP) in the data, the resulting collection amounting to a staggering 11,895 TRPs. Each TRP was then coded for: (1) type of speaker change (current speaker selects next speaker, next speaker self-selects, or current speaker continues); (2) scenario of speaker change (e.g. speaker change with or without gap, lapse, active turn-yielding); and (3) turn-holding/-claiming strategy (e.g. overlap, latching, lexical strategy, syntactic strategy).

The systematic coding scheme created is impressive for its breath and the level of detail it encapsulates. One might regret however that it was not tested for inter-rater reliability, as it seems that the author conducted the coding all by herself. More details could have been provided on the methods to identify certain resources. Prosodic parameters in particular could have warranted lengthier explanations, such as on what basis the author determined there was a change in volume, tempo, or pitch.

Section 4 (“Turn allocation in Southeast Asian and Caribbean English conversations: forms, contexts, and frequencies”)
Section 4 focuses on the distribution of three turn-taking scenarios: current speaker continues, next speaker self-selects, current speaker selects next speaker. The findings neatly add to existing research, showing that same-speaker continuation with active turn-holding is by far the most common scenario, followed by next-speaker self-selection with active turn-claiming. The section then compares turn-taking scenarios in the two datasets. The author describes differences between Southeast Asian and Caribbean conversations; however, none of them were found to be statistically significant.

Section 5 (“Turn-claiming and turn-holding resources in Southeast Asian and Caribbean English Conversations”)
With its 115 pages, Section 5 is the most substantial part of the book. The section covers three types of resources mobilized to hold or claim a turn: (1) latches and overlaps, (2) phonetic resources, and (3) syntactic resources.

Findings on overlaps concur with Sidnell’s (2001) study on Guyanese English Creole, namely that “overlaps follow regular patterns and that the occurrence of simultaneous talk is a consequence rather than a violation of the turn-taking system” (p. 123) and that the majority of cases are quickly resolved. Latching allows participants to establish an early claim on a turn, but for that reason it is vulnerable to overlap.

Four types of phonetic resources were found to be relevant to turn-holding and turn-claiming: clicks, volume, tempo, and intonation. Among lexical resources, the author focused on planners (e.g. “erm”), address terms (e.g. names), and particles (e.g. “yeah”, “aiyoh”). Neumaier interestingly argues that clicks are an alternative resource to lexical planners for turn-holding in Southeast Asian English interaction, while they do not seem to be used as a turn-taking resource in Caribbean English. Evidence for a turn-taking function of higher pitch and volume were found to be relevant for the Caribbean English data, where they were used to claim turns or resolve overlaps. Findings corroborate previous research on tempo manipulation for turn-taking, and more particularly, the practices known as rush-throughs and abrupt-joins used to hold the floor, and speeding up to claim a turn. Neumaier also concluded that Southeast Asian participants occasionally slowed down their speech for turn-holding and overlap resolution purposes. Final rising pitch contour is discussed as a turn-holding resource, particularly during storytelling.

Lexical planners such as “erm” are described as “warning particles” which allow speakers to signal their intention to hold a turn (e.g. during self-repair) or claim the upcoming turn. Speakers of Caribbean English were found to use first names and pronominal addresses (“you”) to hold or claim a turn, while Southeast Asian speakers used these resources to select another speaker.

The syntactic resources investigated include self-interruptions, recycles, pivots, increments, and compound turn-constructional units (TCUs). In addition to its mobilization during self-repairs, recycles were used by both speaker groups for overlap resolution. In addition, the Caribbean English collection exhibited cases of “machine-gun utterances”. This term, inspired by Tannen’s (1984) “machine-gun questions”, describes a high-involvement interactional practice by which a series of recycles is delivered in quick succession and often in overlap. Neumaier makes the case that machine-gun utterances “constitute joint performances of captivating and successful conversations rather than chaotic or competitive disturbances” (p. 191). Both speaker groups were found to manipulate syntax so as to hold a turn, for example using syntactic incompleteness, pivots, increments, and compound TCUs, and most particularly at “points of maximum grammatical control” (p. 193).

Section 6 (“Turn-claiming and turn-holding: strategy clusters”)
Section 6 is a short (11 page) exploration of the combination of different strategy groups. For example, the author found that the predominant strategy cluster for turn-claiming is to combine phonetic resources to overlap, and it is common to both speaker groups. It is quite fascinating to read about the most common combinations of strategies in the corpus. This is however the part of the book where more statistical testing would have been most pertinent, given the hard work which went into data coding and counting, and which could have been used to determine whether the - mostly slight – differences observed between the two datasets are significant. This could be a promising avenue for future research.

Section 7 (“Cooperation or fights for the floor?”)
This section presents the argument that “the concept of interruption is misleading and […] even the notions of competition and cooperativeness are problematic when dealing with turn-taking in conversational interaction” (p.234). Neumaier proposes to step away from the competition/collaboration dichotomy and to consider conversations in the light of “coopetition” instead, i.e. “a dynamic system involving competitive and cooperative aspects at the same time” (p. 241). The author found that “neither speaker group can be classified as interruptive” (p. 269), and that cases of interruptions were extremely rare (only 6 cases in her entire dataset). This is connected to how Neumaier defines interruption on the basis of 6 criteria, two central ones being that a turn was considered interruptive only if it occurred outside of a TRP and if it initiated a different trajectory of action than the other turn in progress. Neumaier notes the relative scarcity of research on turn sharing in data other than American and British English, for example focusing on co-tellings and collaborative completions.

Section 8 (“Conclusion and Outlook”)
In a short conclusion, Neumaier comes back to her four research questions and summarizes how her findings address each one. She closes with the message that “[t]his book constitutes a first step towards elucidating the intricate web of language, culture, and interaction. It showed that turn-taking in varieties of English is both context-free and locally inflected, and that differences on the interactional surface might be traced back to different relations of the same underlying action” (p. 270).

EVALUATION

The groundbreaking character of the book is obvious, and this bold and methodical endeavor is very welcome. One can hope it will stimulate further research using sociolinguistics to diversify the data used in conversation analysis, so as to be mindful of language variation as well as under-researched languages. The book is highly recommended reading for all scholars and students interested in conversation analysis, variationist sociolinguistics, and English linguistics. The prime readership is probably slightly tilted towards conversation analysts, as readers wholly unfamiliar with Conversation Analysis might find it arduous when the book delves deep into the technicalities of turn-taking. However, each term or concept is explained in an accessible manner whenever relevant.

One might regret that given the very meticulous coding of the data and the sheer amount of turns analyzed, the author did not rely more on statistical testing. Taking such a leaf out of the book of variationist sociolinguistics could have meant even more dialogue between research methodologies. With the exception of very interesting boxplots showing the distribution of speaker change or TRPs per minute in Chapter 4, quantitative conclusions mostly rest on the comparison of raw frequencies and percentages. When statistical tests are used, for example to compare the distribution of turn-taking scenarios across speaker groups in Chapter 4, non-significant differences are described as meaningful nonetheless, and this could have warranted more discussion.

All in all, this is a fascinating read and a much needed contribution to the existing literature.

REFERENCES

Kirkpatrick, A., Lixun, W., Patkin, J., et al. 2020. ACE. https://corpus.eduhk.hk/ace/index.html

Schneider, G. 2017. International Corpus of English (ICE). www.ice-corpora.uzh.ch/en/design.html.

Sidnell, J. 2001. Conversational turn-taking in a Caribbean English Creole. Journal of Pragmatics 33(8), p.1263-1290.

Tannen, D. 1984. Conversational style: Analyzing talk among friends. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Marine Riou is an Associate Professor at Université Lumière Lyon 2 (France) and junior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. Her main research interests include grammar and prosody in interaction, and healthcare interactions in English and French.