John Heritage and Marja-Leena Sorjonen (eds.), Between Turn and Sequence: Turn-initial Particles Across Languages. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2018. (Studies in Language and Social Interaction; vol. 31). 487 pages, ISBN: 978 90 272 0048 8.

This edited volume by John Heritage and Marja-Leena Sorjonen is an impressive work consisting of fifteen chapters, including an introduction from Heritage and Sorjonen. With terminology such as turn and sequence featured prominently throughout, the volume harkens back to the early days of conversation analysis (CA) in the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, the editors lead off their introductory chapter by situating the book within the seminal work by Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson on turn taking and turn construction (Sacks et al., 1974; Schegloff and Sacks, 1973). As Heritage and Sorjonen note, this early CA work served as motivation for countless studies on language and social interaction and has also paved the way for conversation analysts to venture into other areas of language, such as phonetics, prosody, morphosyntax and also pragmatics, that are involved in the accomplishment of turn transition and the transfer of speakership. This volume too, with its concentration on the narrow topic of particles in the turn-initial position, speaks to the continued progress of a CA research agenda that grew out of a more general examination of turn taking structures.

As the editors suggest, linguistic items appearing at the beginning of turns, for instance “well,” “oh,” and “y‘now” in English, have tended to fall under the areas of discourse analysis and pragmatics and have been given labels such as “discourse markers” and “discourse particles.” While Heritage and Sorjonen note that work in these areas, such as Schiffrin (1987) and Auer and Maschler (2016), have greatly enhanced our understanding of the functions of these items, they also make sure to distinguish their CA approach with “its emphasis on analyzing verbal resources, such as particles, as tools for contructing actions that are housed in turns at talk, and located in sequences of emerging interaction” (pages 2–3). Here they are clear that the interest of the volume lies in these particles as they are “deployed in a variety of activities” and that the chapters specifically set out to “illuminate general contingencies that must be managed in the context of conversational organization” (page 3).

The fourteen chapters following the introduction volume are organized into three separate sections according to the general contingencies in turn construction and conversational organization that they address. The first section puts five chapters under the label of “Sequential departures,” the middle section has five further chapters grouped together as “Epistemic and related issues,” and the final section consists four chapters simply labeled as “Sequence management.” In particular, “Sequential departures” and “Sequence management” are transparent in their highlighting of CA’s focus on the sequential organization of social interaction.

Yet, even though CA’s roots in sequential organization are highly evident, there are at least two aspects of the volume that instill the CA focus with a modern take. First, the book is remarkable in its commitment to a cross-linguistic perspective. Following the introduction by Heritage and Sojornen, each subsequent chapter focuses on turn-initial particles from a specific language that is different from the languages examined in other chapters, which means that altogether the volume spotlights fourteen languages. The languages featured are, in order from Chapter 2 through Chapter 15, Russian, Spanish, Korean, Garrwa (an Australian aboriginal language), English, Japanese, Polish, Finnish, Mandarin, Estonian, Swedish, French, German, and Danish. Given this wide range of languages, it may be difficult for older readers to remember and younger readers to believe that CA has previously been criticized for a lack of consideration of data from languages other than English (Duranti, 1997; Moerman, 1988; see discussion in Kasper and Wagner, 2014). While perhaps a valid criticism in the early days of CA, conversation analysts have now produced a growing list of studies on languages other than English that is far too extensive to list individually here (but see Nguyen and Kasper, 2009 and Kasper and Wagner, 2014). This list also includes several notable studies adopting a comparative perspective on turn-taking practices across several languages (Dingemanse et al., 2013; Stivers et al., 2010; Stivers et al., 2009). The individual chapters in this volume do not necessarily adopt a perspective that compares across languages – each chapter largely sets out to describe the work of the selected turn-initial particles in that language, but together as a volume that crosses fourteen languages, the final product displays just how far CA research has advanced over the years.

And from being viewed as negative, the fact that the individual chapters in the volume do not engage directly in cross-linguistic comparisons can also be seen as a strength. In this one volume, readers can comb through a detailed analysis of voila as a turn-initial component in closings in one chapter (Ch. 13) and then continue to the next chapter (Ch. 14) to learn about the particle naja in German. Likewise, readers can focus on bueno- and pues-prefaces in Spanish conversation (Ch. 3) and follow that up with the particles kulssey and kulenikka as lead items in responses to questions in Korean (Ch. 4). Additionally, users of this book can gain a slightly different perspective by reading about the usage of okej, a Swedish particle that is borrowed from English “okay,” in Swedish telephone calls to a government agency dealing with student loans (Ch. 13). Adhering to the CA practice of providing numerous transcribed excerpts of data, the real value of the chapters lies in their detailed explanations of how these particles contribute to the organization of social interaction in their respective languages.

The second aspect of the volume that suggests a more modern perspective on CA research is its overt concern with the notion of “epistemics,” a term derived from the interest within linguistics on expressions of evidentiality and used more narrowly in CA research to focus on “the knowledge claims that interactants register, assert, and defend in and through turns at talk and sequences of interaction” (Heritage, 2013: 555–556). Although the term “epistemics” was not commonly used in early CA publications, the negotiation of knowledge in conversation, as Heritage points out, has long been a focal point of CA research (Heritage, 2012, 2013). Still, though, this usage of the term “epistemics” stirred a bit of controversy within CA as some objected to what they perceived as cognitivist undertones in its application to the CA research agenda (Drew, 2018; Heritage, 2018; Lynch and Macbeth, 2018). Without making reference to this controversy, Heritage and Sojornen’s volume, to its credit I believe, treats epistemics as a regular part of the CA agenda and, by doing so, pushes us ahead in our understanding of the epistemics of social interaction. In addition to the five chapters (chapters 7–11) grouped together in the section overtly labeled as “Epistemic and Related Issues,” epistemics also arises as a point of focus in several additional chapters, including the aforementioned analyses of question responses in Korean and the Swedish particle okej in telephone calls to a government agency.

If one wants to split hairs and look for a possible place to critique, one may point to the fact that there is no concluding chapter that wraps up and underscores the volume’s main points. To be sure, the introductory chapter by Heritage and Sorjonen does an excellent job of situating the chapters within the main topic of the volume while providing a brief summary of each chapter. Still, after fourteen chapters of detailed analyses each devoted to a different language, one last chapter highlighting the cross-linguistic significance of the analyses for the study of social interaction may have proven beneficial for many readers. Nonetheless, such a criticism is minor in light of the tremendous contributions of this book. It will, of course, be valuable for students of CA, including both those interested in the “old-school” focus on turn-taking and sequencing and those wanting to read more about CA’s potential for cross-linguistic applicability and its concern with epistemics. In addition, this volume will be worthwhile for students of discourse analysis and pragmatics, particularly those that focus their research on discourse markers. Although coming from an analytic orientation that differs from CA, discourse analysts will surely find much valuable information in the chapters concerning the functions of so-called discourse markers. Finally, linguists interested in the intersection of language structure and interaction should also be encouraged to pick up this volume as the discussions in the chapters concerning the placement of particles within and between turns of talk are sure to hold beneficial information about the relationship between syntax and social interaction.