Analysis of the Presentation of the Turn-taking System in the Dialogues of PARFA

Conversation analysis is one of the important areas in linguistics that investigates real conversations and examines them from different aspects; One of the important topics in conversational analysis is turn taking, which determines who and when with what linguistic and non-verbal cues to give or receive a turn. The aim of the current study is to analyze the representation of the turn-taking system in the dialogues of the PARFA collection with descriptive-analytical method. 11 techniques proposed by Sacks et al. (1974) and Jefferson (1973) were used for data analysis. The review of 98 conversations in the three volume of PARFA showed that in 75% of the turn-taking cases, the speaker decided to give up his turn and in the remaining 25%, self-turning took place. In assigning the turn to speak, the "question and answer" technique had a very large share and the two techniques of "emphasizing questions and apologies" had a very small and almost zero percent share in turn assignment. In the topic of taking turns, the technique of "expressing the opinion at the right time" had a very high contribution and the technique of "predicting the end of the speaker's speech" had a zero percent contribution. No particular order was observed in the relative use of turn-taking and self-turning techniques in introductory, intermediate and advanced level books. In general, it seems that speech turn taking system is generally represented in the PARFA, but there are some differences in it with the natural turn taking system of Persian speakers.