Doctoral Dissertation Research: A multi-modal account of turn-taking strategies

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Interactional linguistics reflects a growing trend in linguistics for data and analyses gathered from everyday natural speech. Rather than investigating artificial utterances, linguists today are analyzing how language occurs in real-world situations, complete with all the disfluencies that this entails. A casual observation of any conversation quickly reveals that speakers easily alternate from one to the other with relatively few overlaps or pauses. This indicates an underlying system for determining how these transitions occur. While a great deal of research has been done with English data, there is relatively little that incorporates non-verbal components, which have been shown to have a significant effect on conversation structure. There is even less data from other languages. Even within varieties of English, conversation features can vary enough to cause miscommunication; the lack of research on other languages is problematic.In order to address this lack of data in regards to Russian, this dissertation research project examines the strategies, both verbal and gestural, that speakers of contemporary standard Russian employ in order to negotiate a speaking turn in the course of a conversation. This is accomplished by analyzing both elicited and natural conversations of monolingual native speakers and observing physical sound properties which accompany turn-taking attempts, the syntactic structures employed, and relevant non-verbal behavior including gaze, gestures, including nods, posture shift, and gesticulations in order to answer the question: how do speakers employ syntax, prosody, and gesture to negotiate turn-taking in Russian? While the analysis focuses on the particular mechanisms of exchanging turns, there are a variety of broader applications for the information this project is gathering. As the first multimodal account of Russian conversation structure, the results will help advanced learners of Russian and those members of the diplomatic and national security community who are required to deal extensively with the Russian language or with English-speaking Russians. By identifying the relevant conversation structures and strategies for negotiating turns, this project will help English speakers understand how and when Russians might be using or expecting a different method of navigating conversation. In addition, analyzed data and the publicly available corpus will provide a wealth of new avenues for research, including automated speech generation and pattern recognition. Given the importance of conversation as a unit of interaction and Russian's status as a global language, the potential for other applications are numerous.