Pauses, Transition Relevance, and Speaker Change

The relationship between transition relevance and speaker change, although accepted among conversation analysts, has not to date been the focus of quantitative description. The present researchers cross-tabulated transition relevance and speaker change in the environment of conversational pauses. These procedures produced strong statistical corroboration of the sociological reality of transition relevance. Additionally, analyses of exceptional instances (e.g., speaker change following non-transition-relevant pauses) show that the participants mark these as exceptional.