title: Coordination and interpretation of vocal and visible resources: 'trail-off' conjunctions.
abstract: The empirical focus of this paper is a conversational turn-taking phenomenon in which conjunctions produced immediately after a point of possible syntactic and pragmatic completion are treated by co-participants as points of possible completion and transition relevance. The data for this study are audio-video recordings of 5 unscripted face-to-face interactions involving native speakers of US English, yielding 28 'trail-off' conjunctions. Detailed sequential analysis of talk is combined with analysis of visible features (including gaze, posture, gesture and involvement with material objects) and technical phonetic analysis. A range of phonetic and visible features are shown to regularly co-occur in the production of 'trail-off' conjunctions. These features distinguish them from other conjunctions followed by the cessation of talk.
authors.affiliation: School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, University of Sheffield, Jessop West, 1 Upper Hanover Street, Sheffield S10 7RA, UK. g.walker@sheffield.ac.uk
authors.forename: Gareth
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Walker
mesh_terms: D003463:Cues; D005868:Gestures; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D010700:Phonetics; D011187:Posture; D012919:Social Behavior; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013060:Speech; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception; D013068:Speech Production Measurement; D013997:Time Factors; D014705:Verbal Behavior; D014741:Video Recording; D014796:Visual Perception; D014833:Voice Quality