Publisher's Synopsis
The Making of Multi-Unit Turns is the first book-length treatment to comprehensively describe all aspects of 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 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 by which speakers secure a second turn-constructional unit, and show how grammatical, prosodic, gestural, gaze and postural resources are deployed to extend the speaker's floor in a long MUT, and how speakers and their recipients transition out of the MUT and return to turn-by-turn talk, and also how recipients sometimes disrupt an extended MUT.
