Turn-taking in social talk dialogues: temporal, formal and functional aspects

Abstract

This paper presents a quantitative analysis of the turn-taking mechanism evidenced in 93 telephone dialogues that were taken from the 9-million-word Spoken Dutch Corpus. While the first part of the pa per focuses on the temporal phenomena of turn taking, s uch as durations of pauses and overlaps of turns in the dialogues, the second part explores the discoursefunctional aspects of utterances in a subset of 8 dialogues that were annotated especially for this purpose. The results show that speakers adapt their turntaking behaviour to the interlocutor’s behaviour. Furthermore, the results indicate that male-male di alogs show a higher proportion of overlapping turns than female-female dialogues.