Units in responsive turns

The focus of much interactional linguistic research to date has been on establishing evidence for classical linguistic units like word, phrase, clause, and even sentence, as units relevant for participants in interaction (see, for example, Ford et al., 2013; Linell, 2013; Szczepek Reed and Raymond, 2013). The central units of language in interaction are turns, and the formulation of a turn is crucially affected by its position in a conversational sequence. Viewing grammar from this perspective is what Schegloff (1996) calls “positionally sensitive” grammar. This special issue aims to describe grammar in positionally sensitive terms, focusing on the question of units in one sequential environment in conversation, namely in responsive turns. The articles in this issue explore the nature of linguistic and interactional units in responsive positions in talk, adopting an interactional linguistic approach and using the methods of conversation analysis and functional linguistics. Responsive turns frequently consist of units smaller than clauses, while turns that initiate sequences, such as questions, are more likely to be formulated as clause-sized units. The articles in this special issue focus on the size, syntactic nature, prosodic delivery and bodily-visual construction of responsive units, and the social actions those units serve to perform.