Initiating Topics Through Unfinished Turns in Non-native Speaker English Conversations

In conversational discourse, topic management plays a vital role in enabling interactants to participate in and continue the conversation. Using conversation analysis, this study revisited the actions performed by ‘unfinished turns’ through sequential analysis of a collection of conversations. The data set included a corpus of 27 naturally occurring, videotaped, face-to-face conversations (with a combined duration of approximately 300 minutes) between native English speakers and nonnative English speakers whose first language is Korean. It was found that unfinished turns ending with conjunctionals that were employed by these speakers acted as topic-initiating devices, depending on the response of the recipient. This conjecture is juxtaposed atop previous research on Korean topic initiating practices and unfinished turns, which did not include conjunctionals. The results suggest that L2 learners have, and bring to the interaction, interactional resources that differ from those deployed by native speakers.