ABSTRACT
The author’s analyses of televised political interviews arose initially out of an interest in the role of interruptive speech. Interruptions became a popular research topic as part of a wider concern with how people take turns in conversation, commonly referred to as ‘turn-taking’. Conversation (or at least American and English conversation) is characteristically organised in terms of an orderly exchange of turns, following the basic rule of one speaker at a time. Considerable attention has been paid to how this is achieved in instances when turn-taking is not pre-arranged. Of particular importance was a seminal paper by Sacks et al. (1974), who identified a number of distinctive features considered to characterise turn-taking, and proposed a system of rules to account for the way in which turn-taking is organised.
