[Air-l] hesitations, hedges

[Christian Nelson]

On Apr 12, 2006, at 4:45 PM, Bonnie Nardi wrote:

> Thanks to everyone for all these great suggestions.
>
> Am I right that most of these papers concern turn taking? My student 
> is interested in how people hesitate in expressing ideas rather than 
> in conversational back and forth.

Everything in conversation is a turn-taking phenomenon in one way or 
another. For instance, due to the rules of turn-taking, one cannot 
hesitate at many transition relevance places in a conversation without 
running the risk of loosing the chance to take a turn unless one does 
something to indicate one wants to talk but needs to hesitate. Further, 
what one's hesitation means depends at the very least on the 
immediately prior turn in the conversation. Of course, this assumes 
that your student is looking at conversations and similar interactional 
things.
--Christian Nelson