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

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 paper focuses on the temporal phenomena of turn taking, such 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 dialogs show a higher proportion of overlapping turns than female-female dialogues