Overlap
Marit Aldrup (University of Potsdam) (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7208-6822)
To cite: Aldrup, Marit. (2023). Overlap. In Alexandra Gubina, Elliott M. Hoey & Chase Wesley Raymond (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Terminology for Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics. International Society for Conversation Analysis (ISCA). DOI:
Overlap is the simultaneous production of talk by two or more interlocutors. While occurrences of overlap are typically conceived of as violations of the one-at-a-time principle (Sacks, et al. 1974), there are contexts in which choral speaking is the norm, as in the case of collective greetings, leave-takings, or assessments in multi-party interaction (Schegloff 2000). In CA/IL transcription, overlap is notated with square brackets (Jefferson 2004a; Selting, et al. 2009). The following example, taken from Hayashi (2013: 176), is a case-in-point:
[Auto Discussion 15] 01 Curt: Mmm I’d like t’get a, high one if I cou:ld. 02 (0.7) 03 Gary: -> [I know uh-] 04 Mike: -> [Lemme ask ] a guy at work. He’s gotta bunch a’ old 05 -> clu[nkers. 06 Gary: -> [Y’know Marlon Liddle?
Even though the turn-taking system for conversation provides for the minimization of both gaps and overlaps, brief occurrences of overlapping talk are rather common at or around the transition-relevance place (TRP) and usually treated as unproblematic by the co-participants (Jefferson 1984, 1986; Sacks, et al. 1974; Schegloff 2000). More substantial overlaps, on the other hand, are far less frequent and may, for instance, result from misprojection or competition for the turn space (Schegloff 2000), e.g., in the context of argumentative activities (Hutchby 1992).
In CA/IL research, overlapping talk is typically categorized based on (i) its placement with respect to the ongoing talk, and/or (ii) its interactional status.
- 1 As regards placement, there is a broad distinction between turn-initial (see lines 3-4 in the example above), mid turn and turn-final (see lines 5-6 in the example above) overlap. Mid turn (or interjacent) overlaps occur prior to possible completion points and are more prone to being taken as ‘interruptive’ (Schegloff 1987, 2002; Wells & Macfarlane 1998; but see Vatanen 2014; 2018 for different implications of early responses). Very often, however, such overlaps are systematically placed at points where the main thrust of the turn is clearly recognizable (recognitional onset) or where turn progressivity is impeded by disfluencies (progressional onset; Jefferson 1984). Turn-initial and turn-final overlaps, on the other hand, are typically transitional, in that they occur at or around TRPs and are resolved by one party winding up (in the case of turn-transition between current and next speaker) or dropping out (in the case of two self-selecting next speakers). After overlap resolution, the participants may orient to the relevance of retrieving (part of) the overlapped talk, e.g., by means of restarts or repeat requests (Jefferson 2004b; Sidnell 2010: 55).
- 2 In terms of an overlap’s interactional status, distinctions can be made concerning turn competitiveness and legitimacy. As previous CA/IL research shows, the prosodic-phonetic design of the incoming talk is more decisive for these distinctions than its content or placement:
- Non-competitive incomings, such as asides, continuers or other ‘minimal turns’ (Ford & Thompson 1996), are often produced with lower volume,
- competitive legitimate incomings typically exhibit increased loudness, and
- competitive non-legitimate incomings feature a combination of increased loudness as well as high pitch and are thereby contextualized as ‘interruptive’ (French & Local 1983; Selting 1995; Wells & Macfarlane 1998; Kurtic, et al. 2009, 2013).
Additional resources that may be deployed in competing for the floor are changes in tempo, cut-offs, sound stretches and lexical recyclings (Schegloff 2000). More recently, it has been shown that apart from verbal and vocal design features, bodily-visual resources, such as gaze, gestures, changes in body posture and facial expressions, may be relevant for the management of overlap as well (Mondada & Oloff 2011; Oloff 2012, 2013).
While the findings outlined above are mainly based on ordinary conversation, there is an increasing interest in the organization of overlap in more specialized interactional contexts, such as:
- various institutional settings (Maroni, et al. 2008; Abbas 2020; Nevile 2008),
- online interaction (Jenks 2009; Seuren, et al. 2021), as well as
- child-child and adult-child interaction (Wells & Corrin 2004; Ervin-Tripp 1979).
Additional Related Entries:
Cited References:
Abbas, N. F. (2020). Pragmatics of overlapping talk in therapy sessions. Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies, 16(3), 1251–1263.
Ervin-Tripp, S. (1979). Children's verbal turn-taking. In E. Ochs & B. B. Schieffelin (Eds.) Developmental Pragmatics (pp. 391–414). Academic Press.
Ford, C. E. & Thompson, S. A. (1996). Interactional units in conversation: Syntactic, intonational, and pragmatic resources for the management of turns. In E. Ochs, E. A. Schegloff & S. A. Thompson (Eds.) Interaction and Grammar (pp. 134–184). Cambridge University Press.
French, P. & Local, J. (1983). Turn-competitive incomings. Journal of Pragmatics, 7, 17–38.
Hutchby, I. (1992). Confrontation talk: Aspects of ‘interruption’ in argument sequences on talk radio. Text, 12(3), 343–372.
Jefferson, G. (1984). Notes on some orderlinesses of overlap onset. In V. D’Urso (Ed.) Discourse Analysis and Natural Rhetoric (pp. 11–38). Cleup.
Jefferson, G. (1986). Notes on ‘latency’ in overlap onset. Human Studies, 9(2), 153–184.
Jefferson, G. (2004a). Glossary of transcript symbols with an introduction. In G. H. Lerner (Ed.) Conversation Analysis: Studies from the First Generation (pp. 13–31). John Benjamins.
Jefferson, G. (2004b). A sketch of some orderly aspects of overlap in natural conversation. In G. H. Lerner (Ed.) Conversation Analysis: Studies from the First Generation (pp. 43–59). John Benjamins.
Jenks, C. F. (2009). When is it appropriate to talk? Managing overlapping talk in multi-participant voice-based chat rooms. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 22(1), 19–30.
Kurtic, E., Brown, G. J. & Wells, B. (2009). Fundamental frequency height as a resource for the management of overlap in talk-in-interaction. In D. Barth-Weingarten, N. Dehe & A. Wichmann (Eds.) Where Prosody Meets Pragmatics (pp. 183–204). Emerald.
Kurtic, E., Brown, G. J. & Wells, B. (2013). Resources for turn competition in overlapping talk. Speech Communication, 55, 721–743.
Mondada, M. & Oloff, F. (2011). Gestures in overlap: The situated establishment of speakership. In G. Stam & M. Ishino (Eds.) Integrating Gestures: The Interdisciplinary Nature of Gesture (pp. 321–338). John Benjamins.
Maroni, B., Gnisci, A. & Pontecorvo, C. (2008). Turn-taking in classroom interactions: overlapping, interruptions and pauses in primary school. European Journal of Psychology of Education, 23(1), 59–76.
Nevile, M. (2008). Being out of order: overlapping talk as evidence of trouble in airline pilots' work. In V. K. Bhatia, J. Flowerdew & R. H. Jones (Eds.) Advances in Discourse Studies (pp. 36–50). Routledge.
Hayashi, M. (2013). Turn allocation and turn sharing. In J. Sidnell & T. Stivers (Eds.) The Handbook of Conversation Analysis (pp. 167–190). Wiley-Blackwell.
Oloff, F. (2012). Withdrawal from turns in overlap and participation. In P. Bergmann, J. Brenning, M. Pfeiffer & E. Reber (Eds.) Prosody and Embodiment in Interactional Grammar (pp. 207–237). De Gruyter.
Oloff, F. (2013). Embodied withdrawal after overlap resolution. Journal of Pragmatics, 46(1), 139–156.
Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. A. & Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language, 50, 696–735.
Schegloff, E. A. (1987). Recycled turn beginnings: a precise repair mechanism in conversation's turn-taking organisation. In G. Button & J. R. E. Lee (Eds.) Talk and Social Organisation (pp. 70–85). Multilingual Matters.
Schegloff, E. A. (2000). Overlapping talk and the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language in Society, 29(1), 1–63.
Schegloff, E. A. (2002). Accounts on conduct in interaction: interruption, overlap and turn-taking. In J. H. Turner (Ed.) Handbook of Sociological Theory (pp. 287–321). Plenum Press.
Selting, M. (1995). Prosodie im Gespräch. Aspekte einer interaktionalen Phonologie der Konversation. Niemeyer Verlag.
Selting, M., Auer, P., Barth-Weingarten, D., Bergmann, J., Bergmann, P., Birkner, K., Couper-Kuhlen, E., Deppermann, A., Gilles, P., Günther, S., Hartung, M., Kern, F., Mertzlufft, C., Meyer, C., Mirek, M., Oberzaucher, F., Peters, J., Quasthof, U., Schütte, W., Stukenbrock, A., & Uhmann, S. (2009). Gesprächsanalytisches Transkriptionssystem 2 (GAT 2). Gesprächsforschung - Online Zeitschrift zur verbalen Interaktion, 10, 353–402.
Seuren, L. M., Wherton, J., Greenhalgh, T. & Shaw, S. E. (2021). Whose turn is it anyway? Latency and the organization of turn-taking in video-mediated interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 172, 63–78.
Sidnell, J. (2010). Conversation Analysis. An Introduction. Wiley-Blackwell.
Vatanen, A. (2014). Responding in overlap: Agency, epistemicity and social action in conversation. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Helsinki.
Vatanen, A. (2018). Responding in early overlap: recognitional onsets in assertion sequences. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 51(2), 107–126.
Wells, B. & Corrin, J. (2004). Prosodic resources, turn-taking and overlap in children’s talk-in-interaction. In E. Couper-Kuhlen & C. E. Ford (Eds.) Sound Patterns in Interaction: Cross-linguistic Studies from Conversation (pp. 119–144). John Benjamins.
Wells, B. & Macfarlane, S. (1998). Prosody as an interactional resource: turn-projection and overlap. Language and Speech 41(3-4), 265–294.
Additional References:
Couper-Kuhlen, E. & Selting, M. (2018). Interactional Linguistics. Studying Language in Social Interaction. Cambridge University Press.
Deppermann, A., Mondada, L. & Pekarek Doehler, S. (2021). Early responses: An introduction. 'Discourse Processes, 58(4), 293–307.
Drew, P. (2009). Quit talking while I'm interrupting: a comparison between positions of overlap onset in conversation. In M. Haakana, M. Laakso & l. Lindström (Eds.) 'Talk in interaction: comparative dimensions (pp. 70-93). Finnish Literature Society.
Gardner, R. & Mushin, I. (2007). Post-start-up overlap and disattentiveness in talk in a Garrwa Community. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 30(3), 35.1–35.14.
Kurtic, E. & Gorisch, J. (2018). F0 accommodation and turn competition in overlap talk. Journal of Phonetics, 71, 376–394.
Lerner, G. H. (1989). Notes on overlap management in conversation: the case of delayed completion. Western Journal of Speech Communication, 53(2), 167–177.
Endo, T., Vatanen, A. & Yokomori, D. (2018). Agreeing in Overlap: A comparison of response practices and resources for projection in Finnish, Japanese and Mandarin talk-in-interaction. The Japanese Journal of Language in Society, 21(1), 160–174.
Stivers, T., Enfield, N. J., Brown, P., Englert, C., Hayashi, M. Heinemann, Hoymannm G., Rossano, F., De Ruiter, J. P., Yoon, K.-E., &Levinson, S. C. (2009). Universals and cultural variation in turn-taking in conversation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), 106, 10587–10592.
Vatanen, A., Endo, T. & Yokomori, D. (2020). Cross-linguistic investigation of projection in overlapping agreements to assertions: Stance-taking as a resource for projection. 'Discourse Processes, 58(4), 308–327.
Walker, G. (2015). Phonetic variation and interactional contingencies in simultaneous responses, 'Discourse Processes, 53(4), 298–324.
