The making of multi-unit turns: a spring-loaded door

The Making of Multi-Unit Turns is the first book-length treatment to comprehensively describe extended turns produced by a single speaker. It draws on multiparty everyday conversations in English, using the methods of Conversation Analysis. It brings together the currently scattered literature on MUTs, and goes on to expand our understanding of the ‘natural history’ of MUTs by showing how speakers and recipients deploy linguistic and embodied behaviours in intricate ways, from the launch of an extended turn of talk to beyond the end of the MUT. The chapters report on the diverse ways in which speakers secure a second turn-constructional unit, and show how grammatical, prosodic, gestural, and postural resources, as well as gaze direction, are deployed to extend the speaker’s floor in a long MUT. Further investigating how speakers and their recipients transition out of the MUT and return to turn-by-turn talk, and how recipients sometimes disrupt an extended MUT, this book aims to provide a fresh understanding of the orderliness which underlies our everyday interactions.