Marking the Turn: Obligation, Engagement, and Alienation in Group Discussions

In group conversations, not speaking is the state of affairs experienced by most people most of the time; I refer to this as ‘‘conversational latency.’’ Hypothesizing that conversational latency affects one’s discursive options, I analyze the association between latency (operationalized as the number of turns that elapsed since the current speaker last spoke) and turn-initial words (e.g., but, oh) in twenty-nine experimental task groups, taking turn-initial words as indicators of the type of content a speaker proposes to produce. The findings suggest a model of group conversation in which conversational obligations weigh heaviest on the shoulders of the most recent contributors; those who contributed somewhat less recently remain engaged but have more latitude to take discordant positions; and those who have been quiet for longer periods are susceptible to ‘‘alienation from topic,’’ as a result of which reentry is often accompanied by an attempt to change the topic.