Discourse Approach to Turn-taking

3.1

Methods of Research

The research was done in the following order:

a) An intonation transcription was made of the film. The transcription starts from the

scene at the owner’s box when Columbo starts the investigation.

b) The intonation transcription was arranged into a table, from the next speaker’s

point of view. The speaker’s utterance in a turn was specified to which the next

speaker is responding. This table shows the relation between turns: how Turn 1 is

related to Turn 2, Turn 2 to Turn 3, etc. (See the table in the Appendix.)

c) A table was produced to see the relation between the utterance form and the tone

choice, in terms of turn-eliciting and turn-holding. Turn-eliciting refers to an

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utterance which elicits a turn, while turn-holding refers to an utterance which

elicits a back-channel response (see 2.4). Regarding the tone choice, the table

shows the tone of the last tone unit of the speaker’s utterance. When there are

more than two utterances that signal turn-taking or turn-holding, the tone of the

last tone unit of the final utterance is dealt with. The number of utterances that

signal turn-taking or turn-holding was counted. (See Table 3.1.)

d) A table was produced to see the frequency of tones that signal turn-taking or turn-

holding. (See Table 3.2.)

e) A table was produced to see the relation between the tone of the last tone unit of

the speaker’s statement-form utterance and the tone of the first tone unit of the

next speaker’s utterance. (See Table 3.3.)

f) The findings in Table 3.3 were analyzed.

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