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Most have a broad understanding of the shortcomings communication via these modern mediums pose: social media, emails, etc. While there’s extensive research on the impact on users from a psychological and neuroscience perspective, it would do to look at it from a linguistic, or sociolinguistic, perspective.
If someone was asked how online interaction differs from that of in-person, common answers would range from “no intonation” to “lack of body language” to “emotional distance/little empathy due to the barrier screens pose”. But how do these mechanisms work? Much of this is intuitive, but intriguing nonetheless.
At the most basic level, conversation is composed of adjacency pairs — a concept described by Harvey Sacks in his work on conversation analysis. Pairs are composed of two parts between two speakers (generally, there are such things as expansions, insert sequences, etc.) Each speaker, by the act of speaking, makes the previous speaker’s statement relevant. Turns are allocated almost instantaneously, either through the current speaker’s continuing speaking, selecting the next speaker, or self-selection of the next speaking participant.
How the turn is initiated can be done through a variety of cues. Sacks also introduced the concept of Transition Relevance Places (TRPs), points in a conversation where it is…
