“So What's Up?”: Using the Discourse Marker So to Launch Conversational Business

Abstract

In this article, I use conversation analytic methods to analyze interactional junctures in which transitions to the first conversational topic are accomplished. I examine several ways in which parties in ordinary (and especially telephone) conversations coordinate the launching of first "talkables," focusing specifically on environments in which such moves are delayed. I observed that many such moves are prefaced with the discourse marker so, suggesting that it plays an important role at this interactional juncture. In the article, I demonstrate that the underlying meaning of so as a marker of "emergence from incipiency" serves to characterize the upcoming action as introducing the conversation's first intended topic-something that was projected by the very act of initiating the contact and oriented to by participants as having been pending or incipient. In addition to mundane telephone conversations, I briefly examine several institutional encounters to explore how so gets deployed for introducing institutional agendas.

“Have You Been Married, or …?”: Eliciting and Accounting for Relationship Histories in Speed-Dating Interaction

“…The turn-initial "So", which often occurs in turn-initial position in 'topic-proffering' turns, constructs her question as built off a prior topic (as does "then" at the end). Bolden (2008) discusses the use of 'so' in topic-initial turns, showing how it functions as "a marker of 'emergence from incipiency'"; that is, it "serves to characterize the upcoming action as introducing the conversation's first intended topicsomething that was projected by the very act of initiating the contact and oriented to by participants as having been pending or incipient" (p. 302). F's question, "So what's your: (0.2) history then.…”

Implementing incipient actions: The discourse marker ‘so’ in English conversation

“…While a default understanding of any utterance is that it advances the introduce recipient-attentive matters while 'oh'-prefacing is used with self-attentive matters. Second, Bolden (2008) examined how interlocutors introduce their first conversational topics (such as, their reason for calling), showing that 'so' gets deployed to manage non-routine movement out of conversation openings and into a discussion of the first 'on agenda' item. While these two reports focus on particular contexts of 'so' deployment, this article aims to provide a broad overview of the interactional environments where 'so' is routinely used in order to show that 'so' functions as a marker of 'emergence from incipiency.…”

Accomplishing continuity across sequences and encounters: No(h)-prefaced initiations in Estonian

“…However, it is remarkable for Estonian that an item that has never functioned as a conjunction or adverb can be used as a turn-initial connective within and across human encounters. Functionally somewhat similar conversational particles reported in the literature include the Dutch 'but' (Mazeland and Huiskes, 2001), the English 'and' (Heritage and Sorjonen, 1994), 'so' (Bolden, 2008(Bolden, , 2009, 'anyway' (Lenk, 1998:53-100), and the Korean 'but, and, so' (Park, 1999). All of them are usable in a grammatically conjunctive or adverbial function in the respective languages, while the Estonian no(h) has always only functioned as a pragmatic particle.…”

“…Bolden, 2009:977), and the interactional agendas not being left pending earlier, as is common in cases where the so-preface is used for resumption (Bolden, 2009:981-988). Also, in phone call openings the so-preface is deployed to manage non-routine movement from the opening to the first topic (Bolden, 2008) while the Estonian no(h)-preface is routinely used in reason-for-the-call turns between acquaintances, as will be shown below. delivery.…”

“…They sometimes involve specific linguistic formats (e.g. Hakulinen et al 2003;Keevallik, 2003a;Bolden, 2008Bolden, , 2009) and strategically positioned vocal material such as uh(m) (Schegloff, 2010). In addition, they may be produced with high prosodic onsets signaling initiation of longer topical sequences, among them presenting reasons-for-the-call (Couper-Kuhlen, 2001).…”