Collaborative grammar: the temporality and emergence of clause combination in Italian talk-in interaction

This research is part of a larger project on the topic of clause combination: Beyond the clause. Encoding and Inference in clause-combining (C14/18/034). In  my thesis “Collaborative grammar: the temporality and emergence of clause combination in Italian talk-in-interaction”, I explore how collaborative practices of clause-combining relate to the sequential and temporal organization of turns and actions in talk-in-interaction. Drawing on Conversation Analysis (Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson, 1974) and Interactional Linguistics (Couper-Kuhlen & Selting, 2018), I investigate speakers’ online analysis of turns-in-progress (Auer, 2009a). The thesis focuses on two phenomena in language-in-interaction, which I group under the name Collaborative Turns: co-constructions (Lerner 1987; 1991; 1996), whereby an interactant completes a speaker’s turn-in-progress or suggests a candidate continuation thereof, hence fulfilling a prior speaker’s grammatical projection; and other-extensions, whereby a speaker extends a prior speaker’s potentially complete turn, in grammatically integrated ways, potentially re-occasioning a transition relevance place (TRP). I investigate syntactic formats (and co-occurring embodied conduct) deployed by the participants when continuing, extending or (re)completing a prior speaker’s turn (main, complement, relative and adverb clauses), as they emerge in relation to turns-at-talk. I thus problematize the notion of syntactic, prosodic, and pragmatic completion (Selting, 2000). Collaborative Turns have been described as sophisticated examples of coordinated behavior (Bolden, 2003) and an obvious testimony (Auer, 2009a) to the collaborative and interactive syntactic work that speakers do. By studying collaborative grammar, I show that clause-combining in interaction is an emerging, temporal, and interactional achievement. I thus discuss theoretical concepts, such as syntactic dependence, syntactic integration, coordination, subordination, etc., in light of the practical and contingent needs of participants in interaction. This research bears, then, implications for (i) studies on clause combining in spoken language; (ii) studies on different types of collaborative turns; (iii) studies on Italian talk-in-interaction; (iv) discussions on the concepts of projections and completion, dependency, syntactic integration, and the role of these for the sentence-in-progress. My corpus is composed of 12 hours of video data, recorded in different settings (informal dinners/aperitifs; formal business meetings) of naturally occurring interactions ‘around a table’, in present-day Italian. It has been transcribed following Jefferson’s (2004) conventions for talk and Mondada’s (2018) for embodied conduct. The interactions are all multiperson, which allows me to problematize how speakers use a variety of verbal and non-verbal resource to orient to their recipients (Sacks, 1992) and to turn-management practices in complex participation frameworks.