Drinking for speaking

This chapter analyzes conversations where people are drinking in order to show how they coordinate speaking and drinking. It reviews research on multi-activity and drinking and builds a case for looking at the coordination of social interaction and drinking behaviors. The analysis provides a quantitative summary of where people initiate the act of drinking with respect to interaction; qualitative analyses of where non-speaking and speaking participants initiate drinking; and how participants resolve the conflict that arises when they are selected to speak next in the middle of a drinking action. The analysis concludes with a discussion of modality and action construction, and the discussion summarizes the findings and connects them to lapses, multi-activity, and social action.

Lapses as social objects

This chapter summarizes and discusses the prior chapters and then relates the findings to other domains of social research. The findings of the four empirical studies are summarized and placed into a broader perspective. The lapse environment is characterized as a particular place in talk where particular practical issues come to the fore. Those practical issues that are characteristic of lapses are then related to the range of behaviors that occur in lapses. The findings as a whole are then discussed with relation to other research on silence. Particular attention is given to so-called awkward silence, how lapses can be generative of embarrassment, and how this is grounded in agency and turn-taking. The chapter ends with a discussion of lapses in comparative or cross-cultural perspective.

Lapse resolution

This chapter describes lapse resolution, or the ways in which speakers restart conversational interaction after a momentary lapse. It points out the practical issue is that participants have “nothing” to do next, which is what resulted in the lapse. The analysis then proceeds to describe three alternatives for “where” to go after a lapse: 1) indicate that ending the interaction is relevant; 2) continue or pick up with something that can be traced to previous discourse; or 3) start up with some completely new course of action or activity. These demonstrate the ways in which people draw on the structure of the conversation, the things which were located in the interaction-so-far, the things which they brought to the interaction, and the situated environment itself as resources for lapse resolution. Suggestive quantitative evidence is provided for a preference for continuation after a lapse.

Lapsing out of talk

This chapter describes three general ways that participants arrive at a place where conversation stops. It first describes how the Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson turn-taking system produces lapses, and points out several deficiencies in the model. The analysis examines a range of situations and activities where conversation lapses, and divides them into three main types: lapses as the relevant cessation of talk, lapses as allowable silence, and lapses as the conspicuous absence of talk. In the course of the analysis and in the discussion, the chapter addresses the matter of gaps versus lapses, the importance of bodily conduct and activities, and the relationship of lapses to turn-taking and sequence organization.

Sequence recompletion

This chapter describes an interactional practice called “sequence recompletion,” which is a way that participants in a lapse deflect speakership from themselves. The emergence of lapses is sketched, as well as the types of problems they can engender. Sequence recompletion is then analyzed as a recurrent solution to some of those problems that occur in lapses. The analysis is based on a collection of cases of sequence recompletion found in ordinary conversational interactions. The collection is analyzed quantitatively with respect to lapse duration, the distribution of the practice across different settings, and features of the sequence recompletion turn. The qualitative analysis describes five methods by which sequence recompletion is done and the differences between those methods. The analysis concludes with a deviant case. The practice of sequence recompletion is then summarized and discussed with relation to turn-taking, sequence organization, and unit completion.

Silence and social interaction

This chapter introduces the relevant literature and themes that are developed in the following chapters. It provides a select review of research on silence from various humanistic and social scientific perspectives, giving special attention to studies of acoustic silence as such. It then focuses on silence as it’s been examined in the discipline of conversation analysis. In surveying work on silence in conversation analysis (specifically on pauses, gaps, and lapses), several omissions, underspecifications, and ambiguities are assembled as a way to build a rationale for an extended examination of lapses. The chapter then proceeds to state the aims and main questions of the book, sketches the conversation analytic methods that are used in the empirical studies, describes the data, and summarizes the remaining chapters.