| Much recent work on responses to questions has focused on the prefaces speakers use to manage the relationship of a responding turn to an initiating action (see for example, Heritage 1998; Schegloff and Lerner, frth). Using data from British and American conversations, in this paper I take up the matter of how responding speakers position elements of their responses as a basis for establishing the relevance of ‘slots’ as an analytic concept that is useful for capturing the intersection of turn organization (Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson, 1974, Schegloff 1996) and sequence organization (Schegloff, 2007). In particular, I compare prefaces to responses (including "generic" forms, such as "oh" and "well", as well as particularistic ones, that are tied to a specific query), which can entail a "pre-expansion" of a {response to interrogative slot}, with items that entail "post-expansions" of the same (as in responses such as "yeah, very" and "no, hardly...") in sequences initiated by polar (or "yes/no") interrogatives (cf. Raymond, 2000, 2003). I show that the notion of slots can be usefully deployed to uncover how the primary constituents of turn organization —— word selection, grammar and prosody —— are coordinated in responses, and how the sequential positioning of such elements within them can be managed by speakers to accomplish distinct actions. In conclusion I consider "slots" as a unit of organization. |
