35.1401, Review: Conversation in World Englishes: Neumaier (2023)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-35-1401. Tue May 07 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.1401, Review: Conversation in World Englishes: Neumaier (2023)

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Date: 07-May-2024
From: Marine Riou [marine.riou at univ-lyon2.fr]
Subject: Sociolinguistics: Neumaier (2023)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/34.3054

AUTHOR: Theresa Neumaier
TITLE: Conversation in World Englishes
SUBTITLE: Turn-Taking and Cultural Variation in Southeast Asian and
Caribbean English
SERIES TITLE: Studies in English Language
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2023

REVIEWER: Marine Riou

SUMMARY

In this expanded and revised version of her PhD dissertation, Theresa
Neumaier analyzes conversational patterns in five hours of
audio-recorded face-to-face conversations in Southeast Asian English
and Caribbean English. The book is situated at the intersection of
Conversation Analysis (CA) and World Englishes, two areas of research
which have rarely been combined before. The book investigates the
mechanics and linguistic resources of turn-taking, focusing on the
practices used for turn-claiming, turn-holding, and turn-yielding.
Neumaier argues that Southeast Asian English and Caribbean English
interactions exhibit the same overall mechanics of turn-taking
observed in other varieties of English and other languages, therefore
“support[ing] claims of a universal, context-free infrastructure
underlying informal conversations” (p. 268). While the main findings
highlight the similarities in the two datasets, some interesting
differences are discussed. Southeast Asian conversations were found to
feature more next-speaker selection, continuations, and active verbal
turn-yielding, while Caribbean English conversations are described as
exhibiting more self-selection, lapses, and longer overlaps. Regarding
differences in the linguistic resources used, notable differences
include clicks and slowing down during overlap in Southeast Asian
English, and address terms, and recycles in Caribbean English.
Overall, Neumaier argues that “although its basic system might be
universal, turn-taking is essentially shaped by and adapted to the
cultural and linguistic context it is situated in” (p. 270). One of
the objectives of the book was to test empirically whether some
previous claims about culturally-specific interactional styles can be
observed. Neumaier’s choice of corpus was made in part for this
reason, as her data involve “two speaker groups that have often been
associated with very different interactional styles: Southeast Asia
and the Caribbean. Southeast Asian interactions are often associated
with ‘high context’ communication […], that is, speakers are said to
put less emphasis on talk, as avoiding direct messages and as
tolerating long silences. […] Caribbean conversations seem to be quite
different: they are described as being marked by overlaps and
interruptions” (p. 18) The book’s findings allow Neumaier to qualify
this view by demonstrating that as far as turn-taking is concerned,
these labels come nowhere near close to describing adequately
conversations in Southeast Asian English and Caribbean English.

Section 1 (“Introduction”)

The short introduction presents the study and book structure. The
following four research questions are laid out:
“(1) Does turn-taking in Southeast Asian and Caribbean English
conversations generally follow the turn-taking framework described for
Inner Circle Englishes?
(2) What are the different forms, contexts, and frequencies of turn
allocation in Southeast Asian and Caribbean English conversations?
(3) Which strategies do Southeast Asian and Caribbean English speakers
employ to claim or hold a turn at talk?
(4) Do the findings from questions (1) to (3) correspond to previous
descriptions of Southeast Asian and Caribbean English ‘speaking
styles’?” (p. 3)

Section 2 (“Investigating talk-in-interaction in culture”)
This section provides the necessary background that scholars of World
Englishes (or variationist sociolinguistics more generally) and
Conversation Analysis might be lacking about each other’s areas of
expertise. Most of the conversation analytic research conducted on
English data involves American English and British English, and
research on World Englishes does not tend to use authentic
interactional data and analyze it in situ. As stated in the
Introduction, the author could identify only four journal articles on
conversational patterns in World Englishes. One possible explanation
she offers is profoundly epistemological. In Conversation Analysis
“culture (or a certain ‘speaking style’) is not a priori given but
manifested in and observable through speakers’ interactional
behaviour, if conversationalists can be shown to orient to it” (p.
16). By contrast, “[r]esearch in World Englishes is rooted in
sociolinguistic theory, thus having a completely different starting
point: language is essentially seen as influenced by external factors,
such as region, sociohistorical background, or identity” (p. 16).

Section 3 (“Codifying patterns of interaction”)
This section presents the data and methodology. Neumaier assembled two
datasets of audio-recorded face-to-face conversations, taken from
existing corpora: the Asian Corpus of English (ACE, Kirkpatrick et
al., 2020) and the International Corpus of English (ICE, Schneider,
2017). In the 3 interactions taken from the ACE corpus, the
participants come from China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and
Vietnam, they use English as a Lingua Franca, and they self-report as
highly proficient in English. In the ICE corpus, the participants are
native speakers of English, with 5 interactions coming from the
Jamaican component of ICE, and 5 interactions from the Trinidad and
Tobago component.

Neumaier combined the qualitative analysis of interactions in situ to
a more quantitative approach involving systematic coding and mostly
descriptive statistics. She transcribed the data in a detailed
conversation analytic format and designed a systematic coding scheme
based on close qualitative analysis and established CA research on
turn-taking. Neumaier identified each transition-relevant place (TRP)
in the data, the resulting collection amounting to a staggering 11,895
TRPs. Each TRP was then coded for: (1) type of speaker change (current
speaker selects next speaker, next speaker self-selects, or current
speaker continues); (2) scenario of speaker change (e.g. speaker
change with or without gap, lapse, active turn-yielding); and (3)
turn-holding/-claiming strategy (e.g. overlap, latching, lexical
strategy, syntactic strategy).

The systematic coding scheme created is impressive for its breath and
the level of detail it encapsulates. One might regret however that it
was not tested for inter-rater reliability, as it seems that the
author conducted the coding all by herself. More details could have
been provided on the methods to identify certain resources. Prosodic
parameters in particular could have warranted lengthier explanations,
such as on what basis the author determined there was a change in
volume, tempo, or pitch.

Section 4 (“Turn allocation in Southeast Asian and Caribbean English
conversations: forms, contexts, and frequencies”)
Section 4 focuses on the distribution of three turn-taking scenarios:
current speaker continues, next speaker self-selects, current speaker
selects next speaker. The findings neatly add to existing research,
showing that same-speaker continuation with active turn-holding is by
far the most common scenario, followed by next-speaker self-selection
with active turn-claiming. The section then compares turn-taking
scenarios in the two datasets. The author describes differences
between Southeast Asian and Caribbean conversations; however, none of
them were found to be statistically significant.

Section 5 (“Turn-claiming and turn-holding resources in Southeast
Asian and Caribbean English Conversations”)
With its 115 pages, Section 5 is the most substantial part of the
book. The section covers three types of resources mobilized to hold or
claim a turn: (1) latches and overlaps, (2) phonetic resources, and
(3) syntactic resources.

Findings on overlaps concur with Sidnell’s (2001) study on Guyanese
English Creole, namely that “overlaps follow regular patterns and that
the occurrence of simultaneous talk is a consequence rather than a
violation of the turn-taking system” (p. 123) and that the majority of
cases are quickly resolved. Latching allows participants to establish
an early claim on a turn, but for that reason it is vulnerable to
overlap.

Four types of phonetic resources were found to be relevant to
turn-holding and turn-claiming: clicks, volume, tempo, and intonation.
Among lexical resources, the author focused on planners (e.g. “erm”),
address terms (e.g. names), and particles (e.g. “yeah”, “aiyoh”).
Neumaier interestingly argues that clicks are an alternative resource
to lexical planners for turn-holding in Southeast Asian English
interaction, while they do not seem to be used as a turn-taking
resource in Caribbean English. Evidence for a turn-taking function of
higher pitch and volume were found to be relevant for the Caribbean
English data, where they were used to claim turns or resolve overlaps.
Findings corroborate previous research on tempo manipulation for
turn-taking, and more particularly, the practices known as
rush-throughs and abrupt-joins used to hold the floor, and speeding up
to claim a turn. Neumaier also concluded that Southeast Asian
participants occasionally slowed down their speech for turn-holding
and overlap resolution purposes. Final rising pitch contour is
discussed as a turn-holding resource, particularly during
storytelling.

Lexical planners such as “erm” are described as “warning particles”
which allow speakers to signal their intention to hold a turn (e.g.
during self-repair) or claim the upcoming turn. Speakers of Caribbean
English were found to use first names and pronominal addresses (“you”)
to hold or claim a turn, while Southeast Asian speakers used these
resources to select another speaker.

The syntactic resources investigated include self-interruptions,
recycles, pivots, increments, and compound turn-constructional units
(TCUs). In addition to its mobilization during self-repairs, recycles
were used by both speaker groups for overlap resolution. In addition,
the Caribbean English collection exhibited cases of “machine-gun
utterances”. This term, inspired by Tannen’s (1984) “machine-gun
questions”, describes a high-involvement interactional practice by
which a series of recycles is delivered in quick succession and often
in overlap. Neumaier makes the case that machine-gun utterances
“constitute joint performances of captivating and successful
conversations rather than chaotic or competitive disturbances” (p.
191). Both speaker groups were found to manipulate syntax so as to
hold a turn, for example using syntactic incompleteness, pivots,
increments, and compound TCUs, and most particularly at “points of
maximum grammatical control” (p. 193).

Section 6 (“Turn-claiming and turn-holding: strategy clusters”)
Section 6 is a short (11 page) exploration of the combination of
different strategy groups. For example, the author found that the
predominant strategy cluster for turn-claiming is to combine phonetic
resources to overlap, and it is common to both speaker groups. It is
quite fascinating to read about the most common combinations of
strategies in the corpus. This is however the part of the book where
more statistical testing would have been most pertinent, given the
hard work which went into data coding and counting, and which could
have been used to determine whether the - mostly slight – differences
observed between the two datasets are significant. This could be a
promising avenue for future research.

Section 7 (“Cooperation or fights for the floor?”)
This section presents the argument that “the concept of interruption
is misleading and […] even the notions of competition and
cooperativeness are problematic when dealing with turn-taking in
conversational interaction” (p.234). Neumaier proposes to step away
from the competition/collaboration dichotomy and to consider
conversations in the light of “coopetition” instead, i.e. “a dynamic
system involving competitive and cooperative aspects at the same time”
(p. 241). The author found that “neither speaker group can be
classified as interruptive” (p. 269), and that cases of interruptions
were extremely rare (only 6 cases in her entire dataset). This is
connected to how Neumaier defines interruption on the basis of 6
criteria, two central ones being that a turn was considered
interruptive only if it occurred outside of a TRP and if it initiated
a different trajectory of action than the other turn in progress.
Neumaier notes the relative scarcity of research on turn sharing in
data other than American and British English, for example focusing on
co-tellings and collaborative completions.

Section 8 (“Conclusion and Outlook”)
In a short conclusion, Neumaier comes back to her four research
questions and summarizes how her findings address each one. She closes
with the message that “[t]his book constitutes a first step towards
elucidating the intricate web of language, culture, and interaction.
It showed that turn-taking in varieties of English is both
context-free and locally inflected, and that differences on the
interactional surface might be traced back to different relations of
the same underlying action” (p. 270).

EVALUATION

The groundbreaking character of the book is obvious, and this bold and
methodical endeavor is very welcome. One can hope it will stimulate
further research using sociolinguistics to diversify the data used in
conversation analysis, so as to be mindful of language variation as
well as under-researched languages. The book is highly recommended
reading for all scholars and students interested in conversation
analysis, variationist sociolinguistics, and English linguistics. The
prime readership is probably slightly tilted towards conversation
analysts, as readers wholly unfamiliar with Conversation Analysis
might find it arduous when the book delves deep into the
technicalities of turn-taking. However, each term or concept is
explained in an accessible manner whenever relevant.

One might regret that given the very meticulous coding of the data and
the sheer amount of turns analyzed, the author did not rely more on
statistical testing. Taking such a leaf out of the book of
variationist sociolinguistics could have meant even more dialogue
between research methodologies. With the exception of very interesting
boxplots showing the distribution of speaker change or TRPs per minute
in Chapter 4, quantitative conclusions mostly rest on the comparison
of raw frequencies and percentages. When statistical tests are used,
for example to compare the distribution of turn-taking scenarios
across speaker groups in Chapter 4, non-significant differences are
described as meaningful nonetheless, and this could have warranted
more discussion.

All in all, this is a fascinating read and a much needed contribution
to the existing literature.

REFERENCES

Kirkpatrick, A., Lixun, W., Patkin, J., et al. 2020. ACE.
https://corpus.eduhk.hk/ace/index.html

Schneider, G. 2017. International Corpus of English (ICE).
www.ice-corpora.uzh.ch/en/design.html.

Sidnell, J. 2001. Conversational turn-taking in a Caribbean English
Creole. Journal of Pragmatics 33(8), p.1263-1290.

Tannen, D. 1984. Conversational style: Analyzing talk among friends.
Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Marine Riou is an Associate Professor at Université Lumière Lyon 2
(France) and junior member of the Institut Universitaire de France.
Her main research interests include grammar and prosody in
interaction, and healthcare interactions in English and French.



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