Syntactic and prosodic forms of first names in institutional interaction involving multiple participants

Abstract

This paper examines one aspect of turn-taking organization in institutional interactions: the use of first names and their prosodic marking for next-speaker selection. Institutional interaction is characterized by asymmetrical rights to talk and pre-allocation of action. This involves the restriction of one party to asking questions and the other to responding to them. The analysis focuses on two of these multiparty formal situations: co-present classroom participants and live interactive television broadcast with remote participants. In each context, turn allocation is determined by one party: the teacher or TV host. After asking a question as a sequence-initiating action, the teacher or host designates the next speaker by name. The use of first names is situatedly examined in terms of turn-taking organization and prosodic characteristics. The study examines how the prosodic marking is context-sensitive: do the participants have visual access to each other’s actions and how is a name used to attract attention? This paper analyses the formation and maintaining of a mutual orientation towards a single conversational action: selecting and giving the floor to a co-participant of the conversation in an institutional framework. These detailed descriptions of the sequential order are based on ethnomethodologically-informed conversation analysis. The objective is to compare four “single cases”, preserving the specificities and “whatness” of each excerpt.