Turn management in Garrwa mixed-language conversations

In this paper we present a Conversation Analytic exploration of turn-taking practices in the conversations of five elderly Garrwa women. The inspiration for this work has come from observations on Aboriginal conversational style made by Michael Walsh in his earlier ethnographic and linguistic fieldwork in the Wadeye community. Through working empirically with a corpus of closely transcribed talk in a different community from that described by Walsh, we hope to come closer to understanding patterns of conversational behaviour that underlie his general observations. Here we examine a range of factors associated with conversational turn-taking: the timing of when someone chooses to start talking; how gaps and overlaps are tolerated; use and placement of response tokens, and orientation of speakers to starting their turns at points of (possible) completion of prior utterances. 1 [Introduction extract