Announcing 'Stammering Research' - Stammering Research - UCL

Stammering Research. Vol. 1.
The achievement of multi-unit turns described in this section is also contingent upon speaker-recipient
collaboration but here recipients play a more pro-active role. For instance, by passing the opportunity to
take a turn at talk at a transition relevance place, a recipient may be seen to initiate a possible multi-unit
turn by the speaker. Failure to take a turn at talk, of course, does not necessarily suggest complete
inactivity, and recipients often produce some form of behaviour, including vocalisations such as 'uh huh',
'mm hmm', and 'yeah' and associated non-verbal behaviours like head nods. Schegloff questions the
traditional linguistic treatment of these as evidence of attention, interest, and understanding, based as they
are on a consideration of these events taken in the aggregate with each removed from its context of
occurrence, and advocates instead the analysis of particular instances. The following quote from Schegloff
(1982:80) serves to illustrate the methodological distinctions between the two approaches:
Although appeals to signalling attention, interest, and/or understanding appear
equivocal when invoked on behalf of the aggregated occurrence of tokens such as “uh
huh”, “yeah”, and the like removed from their particular environments, such accounts
may be viable and strong when introduced for delimited and described cases in which
the relevance of these for the parties to the conversation at that point in the talk can be
shown. Appropriate sets of such analysed single cases may then be assembled to
display recurrent practices, themes, structures, etc.
Schegloff (1982:81) goes on to assert that, by passing an opportunity to produce a full turn at talk, 'uh
huh' and cognate utterances 'exhibit on the part of its producer an understanding that an extended unit of
talk is underway by another, and that it is not yet....complete'. In categorising these items as 'continuers', he
draws our attention to some important issues. First, bearing in mind the nature of the turn-taking system, a
TRP is an appropriate position for participants to display their understanding of the current state of talk.
Second, it should be pointed out that continuers do not merely 'claim' an understanding that an extended
turn is underway but actually display this understanding by declining to produce a full turn at talk. Finally,
only a limited set of behavioural productions have the ability to achieve such an outcome (i.e. display this
understanding without constituting a full turn in their own right) and fulfil the conditions of a continuer.
This characterisation is extremely pertinent to the situation that people who stammer often find
themselves in and the ambiguity that dysfluencies often introduce into the conversational proceedings
means that such a display of understanding is all the more important. Apart from their function as
'continuers', Schegloff suggests that tokens like 'mm hmm' and 'uh huh' can also be employed to pass an
opportunity to initiate repair. We have already seen how such tokens are categorized as continuers on the
grounds that they pass an opportunity to take a full turn at talk. In a similar way their treatment as
indications of understanding and agreement is based on the assumption that if there were problems of
understanding or agreement in relation to prior talk, opportunities to initiate repair would be taken up.
However, as Schegloff (1982:88) emphasises, there is a clear distinction between this usage and the
continuer usage:
With respect to the understanding of, and agreement with, what a prior speaker has said
and done, "uh huh" is merely a claim of understanding. Such a claim may turn out to be
incorrect; and passing one opportunity to initiate repair is compatible with initiating
repair later. The status of "uh huh" as an indication of understanding or agreement is
equivocal in a way in which its status as a continuer is not.
As most people who stammer are only too well aware from past experience that dysfluent talk has a
high potential to be a source of interactional trouble, it is likely that they will be on the lookout for 'otherinitiated
repair' 17 . Similarly, those recipients who are sensitive to the difficulties experienced by people
who stammer may want to offer reassurance that they have understood what has been said, and one way in
which this claim of understanding can be achieved is through the production of certain response tokens.
Schegloff's treatment of discourse as an interactional achievement, then, appears to provide a solid
framework on which to build an analysis of conversations that are characterised by stammering. Where
fluent speech is disrupted by repetitions and blocks of various types the usual signals which promote
smooth interaction may be distorted. In such circumstances the nature of discourse as an interactional
achievement is brought into sharp relief.
The differential deployment of response tokens
Gail Jefferson's (1984) analysis of 'acknowledgement tokens' can be viewed as a development of
Schegloff's (1982) study in that it takes up an issue referred to but not addressed in that paper, namely the
difference of meaning or usage between tokens such as 'uh huh' and 'yeah'. A consideration of the kinds of
work that these tokens do, raises a number of important issues, many of which have a direct bearing on the
problem of stammering. Jefferson (1984:200) suggests that a clear distinction can be made between certain
17 For an explanation of this concept see Schegloff, Jefferson and Sacks (1990). Levinson (1983:339-345)
and Nofsinger (1991:124-132) provide good summaries of many of the key issues relating to repair.
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