What are speakers doing when they overlap with the previous speaker and start their response at a recognition point well before the transition-relevance place? This article adds to the body of literature on overlapping talk initiated by Gail Jefferson and shows that speakers use these turnonset points to show that they have their own reasons to agree with what the first speaker is saying. That gets on record an equal, independent commitment to the assertion that the previous speaker is making. The overlapping speaker strives for a more balanced, symmetrical relationship with the current speaker with regard to time, speakership, and agency. The data are in Finnish and Estonian with English translation. *My warmest thanks to Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, Ritva Laury, Gene Lerner, and the anonymous reviewers for their sharp-sighted and constructive comments and advice on earlier versions of this article. I also wish to thank Leelo Keevallik as well as Ritva and Betty for their help and support in the earlier phases of this study.

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The human ability to anticipate upcoming behavior not only enables smooth turn transitions but also makes early responses possible, as respondents use a variety of cues that provide for early projection of the type of action that is being performed. This article examines resources for projection in interaction in three unrelated languages-Finnish, Japanese, and Mandarin-in sequences where speakers make evaluative assertions on a topic. The focus is on independently agreeing responses initiated in early overlap. Our crosslinguistic analysis reveals that while projection based on the ongoing turnconstructional unit relies on language-specific grammatical constructions, projection based on the larger context seems to be less languagedependent. A crucial finding is that in the target sequences, stances taken toward the topic already during earlier talk, as well as other structural patterns, are among the resources that recipients use for projecting how and when the ongoing turn will end.

This paper studies adults’ responses to children’s requests by focusing on turns that account for not granting the request on the grounds of involvement in another activity, i.e., multiactivity. The data consist of everyday interactions among family members at homes and in cars. The collection – 17 request sequences – is analysed with the conversation analytic method. We show the following: first, account turns verbalise either the ongoing or the requested activity, or both; second, account turns are a practice for foregrounding and communicating “exclusive order”, i.e., they indicate that two progressing activities intersect with each other and cannot be progressed simultaneously, and that one activity is prioritised over another; third, account turns are used either to suspend or abandon the course of action initiated by the request; fourth, accounts – through various sequential and turn design features – display adults’ level of commitment to resuming and returning to the requested activity later; and, finally, accounts indicating high commitment negotiate the “sequential implicativenesses” of the intersecting courses of action, displaying orientation to progress initiated activities. Accounts that display partial or no commitment frame the prioritisation of an activity in terms of “incapability” or “unwillingness” to progress the request sequence and thereby construct the “limits of multiactivity” in situ.