Interactional units in conversation: syntactic, intonational, and pragmatic resources for the management of turns

The research reported in this chapter is intended as a contribution to an understanding of the basic linguistic units used by speakers in spontaneous communication. Our interest is in the linguistic factors associated with the split-second timing of next turn onset that has been documented in conversation analytic literature (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson, 1974; Jefferson, 1973; Wilson and Zimmerman, 1986).