Pivot Constructions in Talk-in-Interaction
| Number: | P63 |
| Organizer: | Norén, Niklas |
| Co-Organizer: | Per Linell |
| Abstract: | |
| Pivot (or apokoinou) constructions are recurrent phenomena in conversational language (Schegloff 1979, Scheutz 2005). The following utterance is a simple example (from Walker 1996:3), where talk has been about colours of dresses which Emma and Lottie have seen on a recent shopping trip: 1. Lot: [ any ] 2. Emm: [but I](’d) l:ove the bone was so:: 3. Emm: beautif eh the pink was exquisite The segment \'the bone\' (the “pivot”) is used as the syntactic ending of a first clause and then used as the beginning of a second clause. Studies of pivots in talk during the last decades have shown that the nature of this family of construction types has to be re-specified. For example, within the traditions of classical grammar and theoretical linguistics, these construction types are either dismissed as non-grammatical or considered to be the mere products of errors on the part of speakers. In conversation analytic work, however, they are found to be participant’s resources and methods for handling repair (Sacks 1992[1969], Schegloff 1979), turn continuation (Walker 2006), and the resolving of local communicative projects and goals (Norén 2007, Betz 2008). These studies have been done using English, Swedish and German conversational data respectively, and it is now time to compare these results, and to widen the empirical basis to non-Germanic languages such as Finnish. This panel will comprise papers reflecting on the nature of pivot constructions in talk, adressing questions such as: How are pivot constructions to be described - as methods of social action, conversational practices, grammatical constructions, interactional units, etc? Which local communicative tasks are resolved with the use of pivot constructions, within and across languages? In which ways are pivot constructions sensitive to positions in specific sequential environments? In what sense are pivot constructions multi-modal phenomena? Which are the consequences of pivots for our views of grammar in talk? |
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