ABSTRACT
The mechanics of the turn-taking system, as we saw, can be used to construct the specific architecture of an interactional speech event in the evolution of turns. Structural analysis of this kind left out of account issues of content and meaning and the use of the utterance itself as a means of communication. These were left unanalysed and treated as transparent. Yet issues of this kind are not simple. Meaning in dialogue is not meaning in the abstract, nor univocal, but that constructed with respect to the other in discourse, and is thus often negotiated. Moreover, it is meaning to be conveyed to another across the barriers of singularity and separateness of those involved in discourse; it functions as and within a context of communication. And meaning is often constructed in the spaces between turn and turn. The business of communication is a drama in its own right within the immediacies of the give and take of speech exchange. Such dramas construct all manner of communicative events as inter-personal events, including those based on miscommunication or non-communication since these, too, are enactions with a process and dialectic of their own.
