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Turn-taking is a central topic in the theoretical framework of Conversation Analysis (CA).However, the analysis has mainly been based on British and American English, and differences can be expected if turn-taking is studied in varieties of English as suggested by anecdotal evidence.The present book, Conversation in World Englishes: Turn-taking and cultural variation in Southeast Asian and Caribbean English by Theresa Neumaier, sets out to fill this research gap by conducting an empirical analysis with the aim to describe, analyse, and compare turn-taking patterns in Caribbean and Southeast-Asian English face-to-face interactions.The major research questions are whether the turn-taking conventions in these two varieties correspond to those that have been established in previous work on turn-taking and whether there are differences between the varieties in terms of culture.The book contains eight chapters.Chapter 1 is the introduction where the author describes the aim of the book and states the research questions.In Chapter 2 the author provides an overview of Conversational Analysis (CA) and of the field of World Englishes catering for the needs of scholars in both traditions.Following Sacks et al.'s seminal article (1974), turn-taking is described as a two-part mechanism consisting of a turn-constructional and a turn-allocation component.The former deals with the construction of turn-constructional units (TUs) defined on the basis of syntactic completion and a variety of prosodic and lexico-semantic devices.The allocational component is split up into three hierarchically ordered rules describing how turn-taking is locally managed through techniques such as next-speaker selection, self-selection, and current speaker selection.Although there is some evidence that turn-taking strategies differ across languages, research on turn-holding and turn-claiming has only been carried out on few languages and "the question whether the turn-taking system might be culturally sensitive is still unanswered."(p.10).World Englishes are chosen as the ideal candidates to display if "the turn-taking system is fine-tuned to local cultural preferences" (p.12).If there are differences in the patterns between the varieties, they will be explained as culturally conditioned, and the patterns will be compared with regard to the cluster of context-sensitive features associated with each variety.One reason why CA and World Englishes have not been merged before has to do with "differences in their respective epistemologies" (p.15).The CA approach calls for 'theoretical indifference' based on the observation that "anybody who looks for differences hard enough will eventually find them in the data" (p.16).Combining "CA's fine-grained bottom-up analysis of interaction" with the study of World Englishes means that "only those contextual factors that show to be locally relevant for the interactants will be considered for the interpretation" (p.17).Studies of World Englishes, on the other hand, are based
Karin Aijmer (Wed,) studied this question.