ABSTRACT
Florian Dreyer and Michael M. Franzen study pauses longer than 30 seconds. They show that what is said before those pauses has a typical structure of uncertainty markers and other conversational elements. If the following pause, then, is interrupted and the pause itself is made a salient element of conversation, thinking-while-pausing can be transformed into conversational objects. Joint attention, the base of all cooperation, emerges again, and pause and its thought content can be made restarting the therapeutic talk-in-interaction, which results in creating and sharing an image, a metaphor, or a scenario, for what was going on during the long pause. The schematic analysis is based on 53 examples of "long pauses."
