Turn holding

Encyclopedia of Terminology for CA and IL: Turn holding
Author(s):	Rasmus Persson (Uppsala University, Sweden) (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7253-9636)
To cite:	Person, Rasmus. (2023). Turn holding. 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: []

Turn holding, also known as floor holding, refers to practices that a current speaker may deploy to inhibit what might otherwise be hearable as a transition-relevance place (TRP) (see, e.g., Selting 2000). Current speakers thereby work to secure speakership beyond such points, engendering a projected or actual multi-unit turn. More specifically, this may refer to (i) projecting more talk to come after the would-be TRP, or (ii) actually producing more talk after the TRP has been reached (typically with some turn design specific to that placement). The difference has to do with whether the practice is deployed (i) before, or (ii) at/after, the would-be TRP.

(i) Projecting more talk (i.e., displaying commitment to continue talking past some juncture) may be done in a variety of ways:

• Lexico-syntactically: Hearably incomplete syntax may serve to foreshadow further same-speaker talk, although this may also depend on phonetic design and visible conduct (e.g., Selting 2000; Walker 2012). Interjections with functions similar to English “uh(m)” have also been associated with turn holding (sometimes terms like ‘filled pauses’ or hesitation markers are used, see Gardner 2001).
• Phonetically: Turn holding work may consist in doing a rush-through of the last metrical foot before the potential TRP (Schegloff 1982: 76; Walker, 2010), or articulatory anticipation of more talk (Local & Walker 2012). Turn holding may also be done in English as withholding of a TRP-projecting pitch accent (Wells & MacFarlane 1998). In pause environments, sustained glottal closure has turn holding functions in English (Local & Kelly 1986); similarly, in Finnish, glottal closure and other held (i.e., not audibly released) articulations serve turn-holding functions, and coparticipants do not come in on such occasions (Ogden 2001).
• Visibly: Turn holding practices may also rely on visible resources, such as averting gaze from co-participants (Auer 2021; Kendrick, et al. 2023), producing a manual gesture that is unfinished as the point of possible TCU completion approaches (Kendrick, et al. 2023), or doing a ‘thinking face’ (Goodwin & Goodwin 1986).

(ii) Once a speaker has arrived at a would-be TRP, other turn-holding practices may serve a similar purpose of securing extended speakership, but “after the fact”, without having projected a multi-unit turn in advance. Such practices involve latching on more talk after the potential TRP, for instance in an abrupt-join exhibiting a cluster of phonetic features that make the post-join talk come off as an early beginning of something new, with a sequential trajectory different from the pre-TRP talk (Local & Walker 2004). Another method is to use some form of pivotal construction (Betz 2008; Clayman & Raymond 2015; Norén & Linell 2013) to seamlessly segue into more talk, thus making the otherwise recognisable TRP less salient and thereby moving to retain speakership for longer. In these various ways, current speakers can thus design the post-TRP talk so as to make any incoming talk hearable as overlapping something already well underway.

Some CA and IL researchers have used the term turn holding in opposition to turn yielding, and either of these might then be investigated for their particular speech or co-speech characteristics (e.g., Ogden 2001). Other CA and IL researchers (e.g., Selting 2000) have stressed that turn-yielding is the unmarked case – it follows from the default one-TCU-each allocation (Sacks, et al. 1974) and does not in principle require special turn-yielding marking. Sometimes, turn holding has been contrasted simply with turn completion (e.g. Couper-Kuhlen & Selting 2001: 8).

Additional Related Entries:

• Turn-taking
• Turn construction
• Turn-constructional unit (TCU)
• Turn allocation
• Transition-relevance place (TRP)
• Choral co-production
• Anticipatory completion

Cited References:

Auer, P. (2021). Turn-allocation and gaze: A multimodal revision of the “current-speaker-selects-next” rule of the turn-taking system of conversation analysis. Discourse Studies, 23(2), 117–140.

Betz, E. (2008). Grammar and Interaction: Pivots in German Conversation. John Benjamins.

Clayman, S. E., & Raymond, C. W. (2015). Modular pivots: A resource for extending turns at talk. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 48(4), 388–405.

Couper-Kuhlen, E., & Selting, M. (2001). Introducing interactional linguistics. In M. Selting & E. Couper-Kuhlen (Eds.), Studies in Interactional Linguistics (pp. 1–22). Benjamins.

Gardner, R. (2001). When Listeners Talk: Response Tokens and Listener Stance. John Benjamins.

Goodwin, M. H., & Goodwin, C. (1986). Gesture and coparticipation in the activity of searching for a word. Semiotica, 62(1–2), 51–75.

Kendrick, K. H., Holler, J., & Levinson, S. C. (2023). Turn-taking in human face-to-face interaction is multimodal: Gaze direction and manual gestures aid the coordination of turn transitions. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 378(1875), 20210473.

Local, J., & Kelly, J. (1986). Projection and ‘silences’: Notes on phonetic and conversational structure. Human Studies, 9(2), 185–204.

Local, J., & Walker, G. (2004). Abrupt-joins as a resource for the production of multi-unit, multi-action turns. Journal of Pragmatics, 36(8), 1375–1403.

Local, J., & Walker, G. (2012). How phonetic features project more talk. Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 42(3), 255–280.

Norén, N., & Linell, P. (Eds.). (2013). Pivot Constructions in Talk-in-Interaction. Special issue of Journal of Pragmatics, 54, 1–108.

Ogden, R. (2001). Turn transition, creak and glottal stop in Finnish talk-in-interaction. Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 31(1), 139–152.

Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. A., & Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language, 50(4), 696–735.

Schegloff, E. A. (1982). Discourse as an interactional achievement: Some uses of ‘uh huh’ and other things that come between sentences. In D. Tannen (Ed.), Analyzing Discourse (pp. 71–93). Georgetown University Press.

Selting, M. (2000). The construction of units in conversational talk. Language in Society, 29(4), 477–517.

Walker, G. (2010). The phonetic constitution of a turn-holding practice: Rush-throughs in English talk-in-interaction. In D. Barth-Weingarten, E. Reber, & M. Selting (Eds.), Prosody in Interaction (pp. 51–72). Benjamins.

Walker, G. (2012). Coordination and interpretation of vocal and visible resources: ‘Trail-off’ conjunctions. Language and Speech, 55(1), 141–163.

Wells, B., & MacFarlane, S. (1998). Prosody as an interactional resource: Turn-projection and overlap. Language and Speech, 41(3–4), 265–294.

Additional References: