Turn Taking Mechanisms in Conversation From the number of conversations we witness on a daily basis, we can see that they are governed by some sort of mechanism or rules. From these observations, it becomes clear that turn-taking is a major element of conversation, along with the organization of the conversation between two participants. Levinson (1983: 296) explains that, despite the "obvious" nature of turn-taking (i.e. A speaks, then B speaks, then A speaks again), the manner in which the distribution is carried out is "all except obvious.” He states that "less (and often considerably less) than 5% of the speech stream is delivered in overlap, but the gaps between one person speaking and another starting are often measurable in just a few microseconds." This phenomenon is of interest to pragmaticians who, through the practice of conversational analysis, have studied conversation at the micro-pragmatic level and sought to theorize the responsible mechanisms. In order to study the turn-taking system operating in conversation, I transcribed three brief conversations from Big Brother 2 (Appendix).Big Brother is a popular reality television game show in which contestants are invited to live in a home for up to 8 weeks where they are constantly monitored and filmed. The public evicts one contestant each week, with the winner being the last remaining contestant. I decided to use the Big Brother conversation for several reasons. First, the conversation was easily accessible and could be replayed repeatedly to study the conversation in detail. Another benefit was that I could see the facial expressions and body language of the participants. Knowing the...... middle of paper ...... analyze the turn-taking system in relation to the theories of Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974). I found their rules for the turn-taking mechanic to be relevant to the conversations I analyzed with enough evidence to support their rules. I also identified other points of interest in the transcriptions and attempted to account for them using the theories of Mey (2001), Levinson (1983) and Tannen (1990).Bibliography---- --------Levinson, SC (1983) Pragmatics. Cambridge. CUT.Mey. J (2001) Pragmatics: An introduction 2nd edition. Oxford.Blackwell.Sacks, HEA Schegloff and G. Jefferson (1974) A simplest systematic for the organization of turn-taking for conversation.Language 50; 696 – 735. Tannen, D. (1990) You Just Don't Understand: Men and Women in Conversation. London: Virago