Abstract

Anna Vatanen, a linguist from Finland, starts her study of everyday interactional pauses with a new question: What is at stake? And how do participants shift from speaking to pause and vice versa? Her material comes for video-recordings. She discovers that participants do something during pauses; they change their position, look to a common point on a table or somewhere else. In short, a pause is in close connection to the situation and its environment, and not only a mental or psychological phenomenon. To infer the meaning of a pause is a complex study — done by the interactants themselves. Her distinction between pause, gap, and lapse is useful for better understanding that in continuing the conversation after lapses means to take up nobody’s responsibility and make it agentively one’s own. She observes the not seldom event that, after a lapse, both participants begin to talk at precisely the same moment, which requires a “sharedness in orientation.” Overall, she has under her conversation analytic microscope 130 lapses, shorter than 2 seconds.