Sequence recompletion: A practice for managing lapses in conversation

- Lapses in ordinary conversation can occur after sequence completion.
- These lapses can pose problems of 'no next speaker' and 'no next thing to talk about'.
- Participants can address this problem by recompleting the previous sequence.
- With this practice speakers minimally extend the prior sequence and project no further talk.

Conversational interaction occasionally lapses as topics become exhausted or as participants are left with no obvious thing to talk about next. In this article I look at episodes of ordinary conversation to examine how participants resolve issues of speakership and sequentiality in lapse environments. In particular, I examine one recurrent phenomenon-sequence recompletion-whereby participants bring to completion a sequence of talk that was already treated as complete. Using conversation analysis, I describe four methods for sequence recompletion: turn-exiting, action redoings, delayed replies, and post-sequence transitions. With this practice, participants use verbal and vocal resources to locally manage their participation framework when ending one course of action and potentially starting up a new one.