When reading the chapter about discourse analysis in George Yule's The Study of Language, I came across the following statement about conversation:
Typically, only one person speaks at a time and there tends to be an avoidance of silence between speaking (This is not true in all situations and societies.)
So I'm curious about in which situations or societies people don't take turns to speak in conversations?
As an English Language teacher, I often have to explain to students who come from very different cultures that most English speakers are uncomfortable with long silences in conversations. So whereas, for example, it might be very polite for a Japanese student to pause silently for some time before answering a question when in Japan—it would be interpreted as polite thoughtfulness in Japanese culture—it is very likely to be interpreted as unfriendliness, or indicative of a lack of interest in English.
This is where it's very useful to teach students the level nuclear tone, which is what English speakers use to show that they are thinking before answering. An alternative is the chin clutch whilst tilting the head and saying well with a protracted level tone before saying something like let me think about that, and then tilting your head the other way and then back again whilst saying hmmmmm. I think the writer is probably highlighting the following part of the sentence:
there tends to be an avoidance of silence between speaking
A common situation is where a listener has guessed (correctly or not) what the speaker is going to say next and starts to respond.
Another is when one person feels they've been interrupted and wants to carry on. Or feels they have been misunderstood and wants to immediately deal with this.
All of the above appear in a flaming row between a couple. :-)
It is possible to listen and speak at the same time, so these still count as conversations most of the time.
A common example is faculty meetings, when Distinguished Professors A, B and Q are free to butt in when they have an idea. Whether or not this works depends on the extent to which Irrelevant Professor F or Invisible Grad Student P take umbrage at being interrupted. There are other examples where a lecture is entitled "Conversation on X", but in fact it is primarily a monologue by a single speaker, with allowances for question and answer at the end.
Traditionally, a "conversation" has a small set of individuals who take discrete turns speaking for a short period of time (maybe a couple of minutes at most) on a topic. By definition, a conversation is turn-taking between equals. We have other words to describe utterance-exchanges that don't follow that form (e.g. lecture, "class"). A "discussion" is a notch up from "conversation", so that one can hold forth for much longer in a "discussion", and a discussion is usually organized around a weightier proposition.
