1.1Turn extensions in various languages

Within linguistics, “non-canonical” syntactic structures such as clefts, hanging topics, apo koinu constructions, and right or left dislocations have been noticed from early on, typical examples being “inversions” or “afterthoughts” in Chinese (cf. Luke 2012Luke, Kang-kwong 2012 “Dislocation or Afterthought? – A Conversation Analytic Account of Incremental Sentences in Chinese.” Discourse Processes 49 (3–4): 338–365. ), or left/right expansions in German (Altmann 1981Altmann, Hans 1981 Formen der “Herausstellung” im Deutschen. Tübingen: Niemeyer. ; Auer 1991Auer, Peter 1991 “Vom Ende deutscher Sätze.” Zeitschrift für Germanistische Linguistik 19: 139–157. ) and English (Geluykens 1987Geluykens, Ronald 1987 “Tails as a Repair Mechanism in English Conversations.” In Getting One’s Word into Line. On Word Order and Functional Grammar, ed. by Jan Nuyts, and George de Schutter, 119–130. Dordrecht: Foris. , 1994Geluykens, Ronald 1994 The Pragmatics of Discourse Anaphora in English: Evidence from Conversational Repair. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. ). We will not consider previous discussions related to various data types (made-up vs. written vs. spoken), but instead we will focus on the way this phenomenon has been treated within interactional linguistics (e.g. Auer, Couper-Kuhlen & Müller 1999Auer, Peter, Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, and Frank E. Müller (eds) 1999 Language in Time. The Rhythm and Tempo of Spoken Interaction. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press.; Ford, Fox & Thompson (eds.) 2002Ford, Cecilia E., Barbara A. Fox, and Sandra A. Thompson (eds) 2002 The Language of Turn and Sequence. New York: Oxford University Press.; Hakulinen & Selting 2005Hakulinen, Auli, and Margret Selting (eds) 2005 Syntax and Lexis in Conversation. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. ; Ochs, Schegloff & Thompson 1996Ochs, Elinor, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Sandra A. Thompson (eds) 1996 Interaction and Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ; Selting & Couper-Kuhlen 2001Selting, Margret, and Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen (eds) 2001 Studies in Interactional Linguistics. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. ).

Syntactic continuations beyond a possible syntactic completion point in speaking turns have been given various names, such as added units or added segments (C. Goodwin 1979Goodwin, Charles 1979 “The Interactive Construction of a Sentence in Natural Conversation.” In Everyday Language: Studies in Ethnomethodology, ed. by George Psathas, 97–121. New York: Irvington Publishers.; M. Goodwin 1980Goodwin, Marjorie H. 1980 “Processes of Mutual Monitoring Implicated in the Production of Description Sequences.” Sociological Inquiry 50: 303–317. ), expansions (Auer 1991Auer, Peter 1991 “Vom Ende deutscher Sätze.” Zeitschrift für Germanistische Linguistik 19: 139–157. , 1996Auer, Peter 1996 “On the Prosody and Syntax of Turn-Continuations.” In Prosody in Conversation. Interactional Studies, ed. by Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, and Margret Selting, 57–100. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ), right dislocations (Selting 1994Selting, Margret 1994 “Konstruktionen am Satzrand als interaktive Ressource in natürlichen Gesprächen.” In Was determiniert Wortstellungsvariation? Studien zu einem Interaktionsfeld von Grammatik, Pragmatik und Sprachtypologie, ed. by Brigitta Haftka, 229–318. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. ), supplementation or inclusion (Nekvapil 1991Nekvapil, Jiří 1991 “The Syntactic Process of Parcellation and Supplementation and Their Results: Parcellated Formations and Supplemented Formations.” In Neue Fragen der Linguistik. Akten des 25. linguistischen Kolloquiums, Paderborn 1990, ed. by Elisabeth Feldbusch, Reiner Pogarell, and Cornelia Weiss, 329–333. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.), post-predicate additions or recompleters (Tanaka 2000Tanaka, Hiroko 2000 “Turn Projection in Japanese Talk-in-Interaction.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 33 (1): 1–38. ), or increments (Schegloff 1996Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1996 “Turn Organization: One Intersection of Grammar and Interaction.” In Interaction and Grammar, ed. by Elinor Ochs, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Sandra A. Thompson, 52–133. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ), inter alia. The interest in and frequency of this type of phenomenon can be traced back to Sacks’, Schegloff’s, and Jefferson’s (1974)Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson 1974 “A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation.” Language 50: 696–735. seminal study on turn-taking, in which they sketched the existence of points of possible completion, and thus places of possible speaker change – so-called transition relevance places (TRP) – mostly in terms of syntax. They underlined the “inherent extendability” (see Luke et al. 2012Luke, Kang-kwong, Sandra A. Thompson, and Tsuyoshi Ono 2012 “Turns and Increments: A Comparative Perspective.” Discourse Processes 49 (3–4): 155–162. , 158) of turn constructional units (TCU) beyond any TRP, which has also been skilfully illustrated by Jefferson’s studies on overlap onset (e.g. 1973Jefferson, Gail 1973 “A Case of Precision Timing in Ordinary Conversation: Overlapped Tag-Positioned Address Terms in Closing Sequences.” Semiotica IX (1): 47–96., 1983Jefferson, Gail 1983 “Notes on Some Orderlinesses of Overlap Onset.” Tilburg Papers in Language and Literature 28: 1–28.). Regardless of earlier accounts (see, for example, Goodwin 1979Goodwin, Charles 1979 “The Interactive Construction of a Sentence in Natural Conversation.” In Everyday Language: Studies in Ethnomethodology, ed. by George Psathas, 97–121. New York: Irvington Publishers., 1981Goodwin, Charles 1981 Conversational Organization. Interaction between Speakers and Hearers. New York: Academic Press.), the English-speaking research community has been displaying a growing interest in syntactic extensions mainly since Schegloff (1996)Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1996 “Turn Organization: One Intersection of Grammar and Interaction.” In Interaction and Grammar, ed. by Elinor Ochs, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Sandra A. Thompson, 52–133. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. introduced the notion of increment for the description of post-possible completions of TCUs (ibid., 83ff.).

The same speaker can continue speaking beyond a point of possible syntactic completion (i.e., a TRP) by either continuing in a syntactically fitted (i.e., an increment) or syntactically independent way (i.e., a new TCU, such as in multi-unit turns). Phenomena such as address terms, courtesy terms, tag questions (Jefferson 1973Jefferson, Gail 1973 “A Case of Precision Timing in Ordinary Conversation: Overlapped Tag-Positioned Address Terms in Closing Sequences.” Semiotica IX (1): 47–96.), or post-position stance markers (formulaic elements such as “I dunno”) are mostly excluded from the class of increments (Schegloff 1996Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1996 “Turn Organization: One Intersection of Grammar and Interaction.” In Interaction and Grammar, ed. by Elinor Ochs, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Sandra A. Thompson, 52–133. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. , 90). Schegloff defines increments mainly with regards to the grammatical relationship, i.e., there must be a syntactical link between the initial or host TCU and its continuation, as “[s]ome of these appear to add a new grammatical unit (often a phrase or a clause) to what preceded […]” (Schegloff 1996Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1996 “Turn Organization: One Intersection of Grammar and Interaction.” In Interaction and Grammar, ed. by Elinor Ochs, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Sandra A. Thompson, 52–133. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. , 90), or “complement […] a grammatical construction with which the prior TCU had apparently come to closure […]” (ibid.). Ford, Fox & Thompson (2002)Ford, Cecilia E., Barbara A. Fox, and Sandra A. Thompson 2002 “Constituency and the Grammar of Turn Increments.” In The Language of Turn and Sequence, ed. by Cecilia E. Ford, Barbara A. Fox, and Sandra A. Thompson, 14–38. Oxford: Oxford University Press. also rely on a very general syntactic criterion for defining extensions, according to them they are “nonmain-clause continuations after a possible point of turn completion” (2002Ford, Cecilia E., Barbara A. Fox, and Sandra A. Thompson 2002 “Constituency and the Grammar of Turn Increments.” In The Language of Turn and Sequence, ed. by Cecilia E. Ford, Barbara A. Fox, and Sandra A. Thompson, 14–38. Oxford: Oxford University Press., 16), although for them there is no strict need to have a syntactic coherence (see the notion of the free constituent).

Today, “[s]cholars agree that there can be different ways of accomplishing turn continuation, including with or without syntactic continuation and with or without prosodic integration.” (Couper-Kuhlen 2012Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth 2012 “Turn Continuation and Clause Combinations.” Discourse Processes 49 (3–4): 273–299. , 274). While this has given rise to different typologies of increments, most researchers do seem to agree on the fact that TCU extensions typically do not implement a new action. Instead, they extend or advance the action of the host TCU and are thus retrospective (vs. prospective / new TCUs, cf. Schegloff 1996Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1996 “Turn Organization: One Intersection of Grammar and Interaction.” In Interaction and Grammar, ed. by Elinor Ochs, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Sandra A. Thompson, 52–133. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ; Sidnell 2012Sidnell, Jack 2012 “Turn-Continuation by Self and by Other.” Discourse Processes 49 (3–4): 314–337. ; Zhang 2012Zhang, Wei 2012 “Latching/Rush-Through as a Turn-Holding Device and its Functions in Retrospectively Oriented Pre-Emptive Turn Continuation: Findings from Mandarin Conversation.” Discourse Processes 49 (3–4): 163–191. ). Although the exact role of different features (syntax, prosody, action / pragmatics) in TCU extension seems to be up for discussion (see Auer 2007Auer, Peter 2007 “Why are Increments such Elusive Objects? An Afterthought.” Pragmatics 17: 647–658. ; Couper-Kuhlen 2012Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth 2012 “Turn Continuation and Clause Combinations.” Discourse Processes 49 (3–4): 273–299. ), since Schegloff’s initial description a variety of studies on more or less related phenomena in different languages has been published.

While a large number of studies have investigated English (Couper-Kuhlen 2012Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth 2012 “Turn Continuation and Clause Combinations.” Discourse Processes 49 (3–4): 273–299. ; Ford, Fox & Thompson 2002Ford, Cecilia E., Barbara A. Fox, and Sandra A. Thompson 2002 “Constituency and the Grammar of Turn Increments.” In The Language of Turn and Sequence, ed. by Cecilia E. Ford, Barbara A. Fox, and Sandra A. Thompson, 14–38. Oxford: Oxford University Press.; Schegloff 1996Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1996 “Turn Organization: One Intersection of Grammar and Interaction.” In Interaction and Grammar, ed. by Elinor Ochs, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Sandra A. Thompson, 52–133. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. , 2000aSchegloff, Emanuel A. 2000a “On Turns’ Possible Completion, More or Less: Increments and Trail-offs.” Paper delivered at the 1st Euroconference on Interactional Linguistics (Spa, Belgium)., 2001Schegloff, Emanuel A. 2001 “Conversation Analysis: A Project in Process – ‘Increments’.” Forum lecture delivered at the LSA Linguistic Institute, University of California Santa Barbara: 1–22.; Sidnell 2012Sidnell, Jack 2012 “Turn-Continuation by Self and by Other.” Discourse Processes 49 (3–4): 314–337. ; Walker 2004Walker, Gareth 2004 “On Some Interactional and Phonetic Properties of Increments to Turns in Talk-in-Interaction.” In Sound Patterns in Interaction. Cross-linguistic Studies from Conversation, ed. by Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, and Cecilia E. Ford, 147–169. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. ) or Japanese (Koike 2003Koike, Chisato 2003 “An Analysis of Increments in Japanese Conversation in Terms of Syntax and Prosody.” In Japanese/Korean Linguistics 11, ed. by P. M. Clancy, 67–80. Stanford: CSLI., Tanaka 2000Tanaka, Hiroko 2000 “Turn Projection in Japanese Talk-in-Interaction.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 33 (1): 1–38. ), there has also been a considerable number of studies concerning other languages, such as German (Auer 1991Auer, Peter 1991 “Vom Ende deutscher Sätze.” Zeitschrift für Germanistische Linguistik 19: 139–157. , 1996Auer, Peter 1996 “On the Prosody and Syntax of Turn-Continuations.” In Prosody in Conversation. Interactional Studies, ed. by Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, and Margret Selting, 57–100. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ; Imo 2012Imo, Wolfgang 2012 “Ellipsen, Inkremente und Fragmente aus interaktionaler Perspektive.” gidi Arbeitspapiere 45: 1–28.; Selting 1994Selting, Margret 1994 “Konstruktionen am Satzrand als interaktive Ressource in natürlichen Gesprächen.” In Was determiniert Wortstellungsvariation? Studien zu einem Interaktionsfeld von Grammatik, Pragmatik und Sprachtypologie, ed. by Brigitta Haftka, 229–318. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. ), Swedish (Lindström 2006Lindström, Jan 2006 “Grammar in the Service of Interaction: Exploring Turn Organization in Swedish.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 39 (1): 81–117. ), French (Horlacher 2007Horlacher, Anne-Sylvie 2007 “La dislocation à droite comme ressource pour l’alternance des tours de parole: vers une syntaxe incrémentale.” Travaux neuchâtelois de linguistique 47: 117–136., 2015Horlacher, Anne-Sylvie 2015 La dislocation à droite revisitée. Une approche interactionniste. Louvain-la-Neuve: De Boeck ), Finnish (Laury 2012Laury, Ritva 2012 “Syntactically Non-Integrated Finnish Jos ‘If’-Conditional Clauses as Directives.” Discourse Processes 49 (3–4): 213–242. ; Seppänen & Laury 2007Seppänen, Eeva-Leena, and Ritva Laury 2007 “Complement Clauses as Turn Continuations: The Finnish et(tä)-Clause.” Pragmatics 17: 553–572. ), Chinese (Luke & Zhang 2007Luke, Kang-kwong, and Wei Zhang 2007 “Retrospective Turn Continuations in Mandarin Chinese Conversation.” Pragmatics 17: 605–635. ; Zhang 2012Zhang, Wei 2012 “Latching/Rush-Through as a Turn-Holding Device and its Functions in Retrospectively Oriented Pre-Emptive Turn Continuation: Findings from Mandarin Conversation.” Discourse Processes 49 (3–4): 163–191. ), Korean (Im 2004Im, Hangyeong 2004 “Increments and Phonetic Analysis in Korean.” The Journal of Linguistics Science 1: 365–386.; Kim 2001Kim, Kyu-hyun 2001 “Turn-Constructional Practice in Korean Conversation: Organization of Turn Increments.” Language Research 37 (4): 885–922.), or even Navajo (Field 2007Field, Margaret 2007 “Increments in Navajo Conversation.” Pragmatics 17: 637–646. ). A similar phenomenon has been described in Czech regarding written examples (Nekvapil 1991Nekvapil, Jiří 1991 “The Syntactic Process of Parcellation and Supplementation and Their Results: Parcellated Formations and Supplemented Formations.” In Neue Fragen der Linguistik. Akten des 25. linguistischen Kolloquiums, Paderborn 1990, ed. by Elisabeth Feldbusch, Reiner Pogarell, and Cornelia Weiss, 329–333. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer., 1993Nekvapil, Jiří 1993 “On the Asymmetry between Syntactic and Elementary Textual Units.” In Studies in Functional Stylistics, ed. by J. Chloupek, and Jiri Nekvapil, 186–222. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. ), while on Czech oral discourse, some preliminary remarks on added or inserted syntactic elements have been made (cf. Hoffmannová & Zeman 2017Hoffmannová, Jana, and Jiří Zeman 2017 “Výzkum syntaxe mluvené češtiny: inventarizace problémů.” Slovo a slovenost 78: 45–66., 48–50). Explicit cross-linguistic comparison of turn extensions has been carried out on English, German, and Japanese (Couper-Kuhlen & Ono 2007Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth, and Tsuyoshi Ono 2007 “ ‘Incrementing’ in Conversation. A Comparison of Practices in English, German and Japanese.” Pragmatics 17: 513–552. ; Vorreiter 2003Vorreiter, Susanne 2003 “Turn Continuations: Towards a Cross-Linguistic Classification.” Interaction and Linguistic Structures 39: 1–25.).

Consequently, speakers of typologically different languages have the possibility to go on talking beyond a possibly complete spate of talk in a way that extends the prior unit or alternatively adds a new unit to it. However, there seems to be

[…] an apparent correlation between the authors’ interests (i.e., the kind of syntactic or prosodic features that they pay most attention to) and the structure of the languages that they are working with.(Luke et al. 2012Luke, Kang-kwong, Sandra A. Thompson, and Tsuyoshi Ono 2012 “Turns and Increments: A Comparative Perspective.” Discourse Processes 49 (3–4): 155–162. , 159)

Some language material thus seems to be more adapted to discussing syntactic features (e.g. German), whereas in other languages, researchers struggle with less obvious syntactic features and try to approach extension from a rather actional perspective (see Krekoski 2012Krekoski, Ross 2012 “Clausal Continuations in Japanese.” Discourse Processes 49 (3–4): 300–313. for a discussion related to Japanese and its grammatical features). This has led to studies being more strongly focused on syntactic or prosodic aspects, whereas others are mostly considering functional aspects. While functions cluster mainly around the domains of repair and information giving (e.g. Auer 1991Auer, Peter 1991 “Vom Ende deutscher Sätze.” Zeitschrift für Germanistische Linguistik 19: 139–157. ; Luke 2012Luke, Kang-kwong 2012 “Dislocation or Afterthought? – A Conversation Analytic Account of Incremental Sentences in Chinese.” Discourse Processes 49 (3–4): 338–365. ; Selting 1994Selting, Margret 1994 “Konstruktionen am Satzrand als interaktive Ressource in natürlichen Gesprächen.” In Was determiniert Wortstellungsvariation? Studien zu einem Interaktionsfeld von Grammatik, Pragmatik und Sprachtypologie, ed. by Brigitta Haftka, 229–318. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. ) and the management of recipient response (e.g. Ford, Fox & Thompson 2002Ford, Cecilia E., Barbara A. Fox, and Sandra A. Thompson 2002 “Constituency and the Grammar of Turn Increments.” In The Language of Turn and Sequence, ed. by Cecilia E. Ford, Barbara A. Fox, and Sandra A. Thompson, 14–38. Oxford: Oxford University Press.; Horlacher 2015Horlacher, Anne-Sylvie 2015 La dislocation à droite revisitée. Une approche interactionniste. Louvain-la-Neuve: De Boeck ; Schegloff 1996Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1996 “Turn Organization: One Intersection of Grammar and Interaction.” In Interaction and Grammar, ed. by Elinor Ochs, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Sandra A. Thompson, 52–133. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ), it seems difficult to give a clear cut, cross-linguistically valid description of how turn extensions are used in social interaction. This leads to a highly heterogeneous field of study that considers a diversity of notions, phenomena, and language-specific grammatical features. Consequently, Couper-Kuhlen’s and Ono’s initial appeal for carrying out more research in this domain (2007Field, Margaret 2007 “Increments in Navajo Conversation.” Pragmatics 17: 637–646. , 549) still seems to be a burning issue (see also Luke et al. 2012Luke, Kang-kwong, Sandra A. Thompson, and Tsuyoshi Ono 2012 “Turns and Increments: A Comparative Perspective.” Discourse Processes 49 (3–4): 155–162. ).

1.2Some basic grammatical features of Czech relevant for turn extension

Being part of the Indo-European language family, Czech is a highly inflected fusional language in which syntactical relations are articulated mostly through suffixes (expressing number, i.e., singular, plural, and eventually dual; gender, i.e., masculine, feminine, neutral; and case, i.e., nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, locative, and instrumental) or through prepositional phrases. In syntactic constructions, words are connected by means of their coordination – or dependency – which is rendered by government (1.), agreement (2.), or adjunction (3.) (cf. Čechová et al. 1996Čechová, Marie, Miloš Dokulil, Zdeněk Hlavsa, et al. 1996 Čeština: řeč a jazyk. Prague: ISV nakladatelství., 253ff.; Grepl & Karlík 1985Grepl, Miroslav, and Petr Karlík 1985 Skladba spisovné češtiny. Prague: Státní pedagogické nakladatelství., 202ff.; Hausenblas 1958Hausenblas, Karel 1958 “Syntaktická závislost, způsoby a prostředky jejího vyjadřování.” Bulletin Vysoké školy ruského jazyka 2: 23–51.; Havránek & Jedlička 1963Havránek, Bohuslav, and Alois Jedlička 1963 Česká mluvnice. Prague: Státní pedagogické nakladatelství., 321ff.; Panevová et al. 2014Panevová, Jarmila, Eva Hajičová, Václava Kettnerová, et al. 2014 Mluvnice současné češtiny. 2: Syntax češtiny na základě anotovaného korpusu. Prague: Karolinum., 34ff.):

1. Syntactic subjects usually carry nominative case marking, and syntactic objects mostly carry accusative case marking (rarely dative or genitive morphemes):

   (1)

   Pracovník

   employee[nom.m.sg]

   pozdravil

   greet-pst[m.sg]

   šéfa.

   boss-acc.m.sg

   ‘The (male) employee greeted the (male) boss’

2. The predicate must agree with the subject in gender and number, while adjectives have to be congruent in gender, case, and number with the substantives on which they depend.

   (2)

   1. Mladý

      young-nom.m.sg

      pracovník

      employee[nom.m.sg]

      pozdravil

      greet-pst[m.sg]

      svého

      poss-acc.m.sg

      šéfa.

      boss-acc.m.sg

      ‘The young (male) employee greeted his (male) boss’

   2. Mladá

      young-nom.f.sg

      pracovnice

      employee-nom.f.sg

      pozdravila

      greet-pst-f.sg

      svou

      poss-acc.f.sg

      šéfovou.

      boss-acc.f.sg

      ‘The young (female) employee greeted her (female) boss’

3. Adjunction is mostly expressed by prepositional phrases, adverbs, or infinitives that have no stable positions in an utterance (cf. Čechová et al. 1996Čechová, Marie, Miloš Dokulil, Zdeněk Hlavsa, et al. 1996 Čeština: řeč a jazyk. Prague: ISV nakladatelství., 279, Hausenblas 1958Hausenblas, Karel 1958 “Syntaktická závislost, způsoby a prostředky jejího vyjadřování.” Bulletin Vysoké školy ruského jazyka 2: 23–51., 90ff., Karlík et al. 1995Karlík, Petr, Marek Nekula, and Zdenka Rusínová (eds) 1995 Příruční mluvnice češtiny. Prague: Nakladatelství Lidové noviny., 436ff.).

   (3)

   Na

   in

   chodbě

   corridor-loc.f.sg

   pozdravil

   greet-pst[m.sg]

   zdvořile

   politely

   šéfa.

   boss-acc.m.sg

   ‘In the corridor he politely greeted the (male) boss’

Due to its more intact inflectional system (especially compared to English), Czech has a high projective force (Auer 2005Auer, Peter 2005 “Projection in Interaction and Projection in Grammar.” Text 25 (1): 7–36. ), e.g., adjectives might project not only a noun, but also its gender, number, and case. Though its inflectional system seems to be slowly being reduced (e.g. differences in grammatical gender are being diminished in colloquial spoken Czech, cf. Cvrček et al. 2010Cvrček, Václav, Vilém Kodýtek, Marie Kopřivová, et al. 2010 Mluvnice současné češtiny. 1: Jak se píše a jak se mluví. Prague: Karolinum., 304), it clearly allows for a relatively free word order, with some exceptions: enclitics do have a compulsory position according to the rhythm (mostly at the end of a first phonological word, Daneš et al. 1987Daneš, František, Miroslav Grepl, and Zdeněk Hlavsa (eds) 1987 Mluvnice češtiny 3. Prague: Academia., 604; Naughton 2005Naughton, James 2005 Czech. An Essential Grammar. London/New York: Routledge., 217), and substantive attributes are usually located right behind their governing substantive. Whereas the basic word order of Czech is subject – verb – object (SVO), other variations such as SOV, OVS, OSV are grammatically correct, although they might differ with respect to semantics and style (Čechová et al. 1996Čechová, Marie, Miloš Dokulil, Zdeněk Hlavsa, et al. 1996 Čeština: řeč a jazyk. Prague: ISV nakladatelství., 305ff.; Daneš et al. 1987Daneš, František, Miroslav Grepl, and Zdeněk Hlavsa (eds) 1987 Mluvnice češtiny 3. Prague: Academia., 614ff.; Karlík et al. 1995Karlík, Petr, Marek Nekula, and Zdenka Rusínová (eds) 1995 Příruční mluvnice češtiny. Prague: Nakladatelství Lidové noviny., 645ff.). Such flexibility in word order might indeed influence the possibilities of continuing a turn-at-talk post-possible syntactic completion.

In Czech, word order is also used for topicalisation. Traditionally, the utterance beginning is said to contain the theme, while the so-called focus (or rhema) of the utterance is supposed to be in the last position of an utterance (Čechová et al. 1996Čechová, Marie, Miloš Dokulil, Zdeněk Hlavsa, et al. 1996 Čeština: řeč a jazyk. Prague: ISV nakladatelství., 305 ff.; Daneš 1974Daneš, František (ed) 1974 Papers on Functional Sentence Perspective. Prague/The Hague/Paris: Academia/Mouton.; Daneš et al. 1987Daneš, František, Miroslav Grepl, and Zdeněk Hlavsa (eds) 1987 Mluvnice češtiny 3. Prague: Academia.; Mathesius 1942Mathesius, Vilém 1942 “Řeč a sloh.” In Čtení o jazyce a poezii, ed. by Bohuslav Havránek, and Jan Mukařovský, 11–102. Prague: Družstevní práce.; Naughton 2005Naughton, James 2005 Czech. An Essential Grammar. London/New York: Routledge., 215; Panevová et al. 2014Panevová, Jarmila, Eva Hajičová, Václava Kettnerová, et al. 2014 Mluvnice současné češtiny. 2: Syntax češtiny na základě anotovaného korpusu. Prague: Karolinum., 190ff.; Sgall 1982Sgall, Petr 1982 “Zur Typologie der Thema-Rhema-Gliederung.” In Studien zum Tschechischen, Slowakischen und Deutschen aus vergleichender Sicht, ed. by Gert Jäger, Václav Křístek, and Jozef Mistrík, 173–185. Leipzig: Karl-Marx-Universität.). Consequently, a particular word or component can be accentuated by moving it to the final position. This traditional view on the theme-rheme distribution, the so-called topical sentence structure or functional sentence perspective (“aktuální větné členění”, Daneš 1974Daneš, František (ed) 1974 Papers on Functional Sentence Perspective. Prague/The Hague/Paris: Academia/Mouton.; Firbas 1992Firbas, Jan 1992 Functional Sentence Perspective in Written and Spoken Communication. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. ; Hajičová et al. 1998Hajičová, Eva, Barbara H. Partee, and Petr Sgall (eds) 1998 Topic-Focus Articulation, Tripartite Structures, and Semantics Content. Dordrecht: Kluwer. ; Mathesius 1939Mathesius, Vilém 1939 “O tak zvaném aktuálním členění větném.” Slovo a slovesnost 5: 171–174., 1942Mathesius, Vilém 1942 “Řeč a sloh.” In Čtení o jazyce a poezii, ed. by Bohuslav Havránek, and Jan Mukařovský, 11–102. Prague: Družstevní práce.), would predict syntactic extensions in Czech to be highly rhematical. However, Luke and Zhang (2007Luke, Kang-kwong, and Wei Zhang 2007 “Retrospective Turn Continuations in Mandarin Chinese Conversation.” Pragmatics 17: 605–635. , for Mandarin Chinese) suggest on the contrary that adding new information will lead to a new TCU, while the addition of already known material will be more likely to lead to a TCU extension or increment. More generally, Nekvapil (1993Nekvapil, Jiří 1993 “On the Asymmetry between Syntactic and Elementary Textual Units.” In Studies in Functional Stylistics, ed. by J. Chloupek, and Jiri Nekvapil, 186–222. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. , 214) notes that the “producer” and “recipient” of a syntactic extension might perceive its informational content very differently, as containing a completion or, on the contrary, an emphasis. While Auer (2007Auer, Peter 2007 “Why are Increments such Elusive Objects? An Afterthought.” Pragmatics 17: 647–658. , for German) shows that TCU extensions may indeed contain “new” information, he also underlines the fact that informational value depends not only on syntax, but also on prosody, semantics, action structure, and even on visible components. Since, to date, there is no clear-cut correlation between syntactic and action structure in post-completion extensions (retrospective or prospective, “old” vs. “new”, Auer 2007Auer, Peter 2007 “Why are Increments such Elusive Objects? An Afterthought.” Pragmatics 17: 647–658. , 650–1), this issue is still in need of further investigation.

1.3Different types of syntactic extensions

The previous sections have revealed that there seems to be no consensus regarding the exact structural delimitation or analytic vocabulary that one should apply to syntactic utterance extensions; moreover, no cross-linguistically valid link between interactional tasks and specific syntactic features has been established. As syntactic extensions in spoken Czech have not yet been systematically described, we will adopt a pragmatic approach in view of this heterogeneous body of research and restrict our contribution mostly to formal aspects, i.e., the presentation and discussion of various forms of turn extensions in Czech. We will therefore adopt one of the most quoted and used typologies for turn extensions, i.e., the one presented in Vorreiter (2003)Vorreiter, Susanne 2003 “Turn Continuations: Towards a Cross-Linguistic Classification.” Interaction and Linguistic Structures 39: 1–25. and applied by Couper-Kuhlen & Ono (2007Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth, and Tsuyoshi Ono 2007 “ ‘Incrementing’ in Conversation. A Comparison of Practices in English, German and Japanese.” Pragmatics 17: 513–552. , see also Horlacher 2015Horlacher, Anne-Sylvie 2015 La dislocation à droite revisitée. Une approche interactionniste. Louvain-la-Neuve: De Boeck , 110). Compared to other descriptions of syntactic extensions (Ford, Fox & Thompson 2002Ford, Cecilia E., Barbara A. Fox, and Sandra A. Thompson 2002 “Constituency and the Grammar of Turn Increments.” In The Language of Turn and Sequence, ed. by Cecilia E. Ford, Barbara A. Fox, and Sandra A. Thompson, 14–38. Oxford: Oxford University Press.; Schegloff 1996Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1996 “Turn Organization: One Intersection of Grammar and Interaction.” In Interaction and Grammar, ed. by Elinor Ochs, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Sandra A. Thompson, 52–133. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ), this classification scheme appears to be more fine-grained. By applying the same notions, we aim at supporting the cross-linguistic comparison formulated as a major endeavour in the field, although it might also reveal some analytical challenges as regards the grammatical features of Czech (cf. Section 3).

The first and most basic distinction is the one between new TCU and TCU continuation. According to Couper-Kuhlen & Ono (2007Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth, and Tsuyoshi Ono 2007 “ ‘Incrementing’ in Conversation. A Comparison of Practices in English, German and Japanese.” Pragmatics 17: 513–552. , 515), while the former has minimal syntactic and semantic dependence on the prior unit of talk, the latter possesses maximum dependency. Within the different types of TCU continuation, a first distinction is that between non-add-ons and add-ons. Whereas the former are prosodically integrated, the latter are audibly additions (cf. Vorreiter 2003Vorreiter, Susanne 2003 “Turn Continuations: Towards a Cross-Linguistic Classification.” Interaction and Linguistic Structures 39: 1–25., 5–6). Add-ons are thus preceded by a prosodic break after the host turn. The group of add-ons can then be further divided into replacements and increments. As their name indicates, replacements are co-referential to an item in the host turn and replace that element, i.e., present an alternative version of a part of the host. Increments can be further divided into glue-ons and insertables. Glue-ons have a “particularly tight” grammatical bond (Vorreiter 2003Vorreiter, Susanne 2003 “Turn Continuations: Towards a Cross-Linguistic Classification.” Interaction and Linguistic Structures 39: 1–25., 13) to the host, i.e., host and glue-on form a syntactically coherent construction (Schegloff 1996Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1996 “Turn Organization: One Intersection of Grammar and Interaction.” In Interaction and Grammar, ed. by Elinor Ochs, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Sandra A. Thompson, 52–133. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. , 90–91). In English, glue-ons can correspond to various types of syntactic constituents, clausal as well as phrasal ones (Couper-Kuhlen & Ono 2007Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth, and Tsuyoshi Ono 2007 “ ‘Incrementing’ in Conversation. A Comparison of Practices in English, German and Japanese.” Pragmatics 17: 513–552. , 521). Insertables, on the contrary, do not form a canonically well-formed structure when put together with the host turn (Vorreiter 2003Vorreiter, Susanne 2003 “Turn Continuations: Towards a Cross-Linguistic Classification.” Interaction and Linguistic Structures 39: 1–25., 16). They seem to be “out of place” as they could be more canonically positioned somewhere inside the host TCU. Finally, Vorreiter mentions the so-called free constituents (corresponding to the “unattached nominal phrases” described by Ono & Thompson 1994Ono, Tsuyoshi, and Sandra Thompson 1994 “Unattached NPs in English Conversation.” Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 20 (1): 402–419. ). They show no syntactic – but nevertheless, a semantic and pragmatic – dependency on the prior unit. Whereas Vorreiter treats the free constituents as being a type of increment – as according to her, glue-ons and insertables, as well as free constituents, “add further material to the host” (Vorreiter 2003Vorreiter, Susanne 2003 “Turn Continuations: Towards a Cross-Linguistic Classification.” Interaction and Linguistic Structures 39: 1–25., 21–22), Couper-Kuhlen & Ono (2007Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth, and Tsuyoshi Ono 2007 “ ‘Incrementing’ in Conversation. A Comparison of Practices in English, German and Japanese.” Pragmatics 17: 513–552. , 515) do not treat free constituents as being increments, but as being “somewhere in between these extremes” of TCU continuation vs. new TCU. For convenience, we reproduce the scheme used by Horlacher (2015Horlacher, Anne-Sylvie 2015 La dislocation à droite revisitée. Une approche interactionniste. Louvain-la-Neuve: De Boeck , 110), which contains all types of turn continuations used by Vorreiter (2003)Vorreiter, Susanne 2003 “Turn Continuations: Towards a Cross-Linguistic Classification.” Interaction and Linguistic Structures 39: 1–25. and Couper-Kuhlen & Ono (2007)Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth, and Tsuyoshi Ono 2007 “ ‘Incrementing’ in Conversation. A Comparison of Practices in English, German and Japanese.” Pragmatics 17: 513–552. , and captures as well the slight divergence regarding the classification of free constituents.

Figure 1.Types of turn continuation (Horlacher 2015Horlacher, Anne-Sylvie 2015 La dislocation à droite revisitée. Une approche interactionniste. Louvain-la-Neuve: De Boeck , 110)

1.4Data

The data stem from a series of video recordings of mundane conversations in Czech among friends and acquaintances, taking place at home or in public places such as bars or cafés. The data were recorded between 2013 and 2016 within the framework of a research project (SNSF Ambizione, PI F. Oloff, see acknowledgments). All participants are native speakers of Czech and have received education in the Czech Republic. Within the frame of this paper, we have chosen one hour of each of the following four recordings: (1) CAJ (2014): two women (expat) at home in Switzerland (total duration of 1 hour); (2) FOSNA (2013): three men in a bar in Prague (total 2.5 hours); (3) HAMR (2014): six men at a terrace in Prague (total 2.5 hours); and (4) SOUSED (2016): three female neighbours at home close to Ostrava (total 1 hour). Data have been recorded with one ((1), (4)) or two cameras ((2), (3)), and in all settings a supplementary audio recorder has been placed close to the participants. However, due to noisy surroundings (settings 2 and 3), detailed phonetic features are not systematically available. Excerpts have been transcribed according to Jeffersonian conventions (Jefferson 2004Jefferson, Gail 2004 “Glossary of Transcript Symbols with an Introduction.” In Conversation Analysis. Studies from the First Generation, ed. by Gene H. Lerner, 13–31. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. ), in addition, semicolons indicate a slightly falling intonation (Selting et al. 2009Selting, Margret, Peter Auer, Dagmar Barth-Weingarten, et al. 2009 “Gesprächsanalytisches Transkriptionssystem 2 (GAT 2).” Gesprächsforschung Online 10: 353–402.), thus four intonation markers are used (i.e., ? / , / ; / . ). If none of the aforementioned signs is used as final prosodic mark, this corresponds to level intonation (Jefferson 2004Jefferson, Gail 2004 “Glossary of Transcript Symbols with an Introduction.” In Conversation Analysis. Studies from the First Generation, ed. by Gene H. Lerner, 13–31. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. , 27). Proper names – except for publicly known celebrities or brand names – have been replaced by pseudonyms. Orthography has been adapted to correctly reproduce recurrent features of spoken Czech (Kaderka & Svobodová 2006Kaderka, Petr, and Zdeňka Svobodová 2006 “Jak přepisovat audiovizuální záznam rozhovoru? Manuál pro přepisovatele televizních diskusních pořadů.” Jazykovědné aktuality 43 (3–4): 18–51.), e.g., prothetic “v” in lexical items beginning with the vowel “o”, i.e., “(v)on” / “he”, “(v)okno” / “window”, or “ej” replacing the adjectival suffix “ý”, i.e., “výbornej” instead of “výborný” (see also Hronek & Sgall 1992Hronek, Jiří, and Petr Sgall 1992 Čeština bez příkras. Prague: H&H.; Kodýtek 2007Kodýtek, Vilém 2007 “Mluvená čeština v Praze a Brně: sonda do mluvených korpusů.” Slovo a slovesnost (1): 23–37.; Townsend 1990Townsend, Charles E. 1990 A Description of Spoken Prague Czech. Columbus: Slavica Publishers.; Wilson 2010Wilson, James 2010 Moravians in Prague. A Sociolinguistic Study of Dialect Contact in the Czech Republic. Frankfurt/Berlin/Brussels: Peter Lang.).

2.1Non-add-ons

Non-add-ons describe extensions that show no prosodic break between the host TCU and its extension, despite the syntactic closure. Due to the relatively free word order in Czech, it seems more difficult to identify non-add-ons and they thus seem to be rather rare. One example is shown in Excerpt (4). The girl’s surname “Boudová” is appended to an otherwise already complete syntactic construction (lines 4–5, “Eva was there”, see also Example (1) in Couper-Kuhlen & Ono 2007Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth, and Tsuyoshi Ono 2007 “ ‘Incrementing’ in Conversation. A Comparison of Practices in English, German and Japanese.” Pragmatics 17: 513–552. , 517–8).

1 IVA pak  tam   byl     i     Radek Moravec,  že jo:;
      then there is-pst.m also ((name[nom.m]))  tag tag
      then there was also Radek Moravec huh
2     [se  Z- ] (0.2) se     Zlatanem,
       with Z-        with ((first name-ins))
      [with Z-] (0.2) with Zlatan
3 MAR [no:    ]
      [yeah   ]
4 MAR no:, a   I    TA            
                                                        Evička
      yeah and also dem-f.sg.nom ((first name-dim-nom.f))
      yeah and also Eva
5     tam   byla      Boudová.
      there is-pst-f ((last name-nom.f))
      was there Boudová
6 IVA jo.
      yeah

2.2Add-ons

In the case of add-ons, the extension is prosodically and perceptually separated from the host TCU, i.e., material is audibly added to an otherwise complete syntactic structure. In case of replacements (2.2.1), the extension replaces an element of the host TCU, establishing a kind of co-referential relationship. The other category of add-ons, increments (2.2.2), does concern the addition of new material without replacing a previous element.

2.2.1Replacements

Replacements can concern various grammatical elements: nouns or adjectives (English, Couper-Kuhlen & Ono 2007Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth, and Tsuyoshi Ono 2007 “ ‘Incrementing’ in Conversation. A Comparison of Practices in English, German and Japanese.” Pragmatics 17: 513–552. ), but also verbs (Japanese, ibid., 540) or whole clauses (German, ibid., 529). In our data, extensions of this type frequently concern nouns or pronouns, i.e., either a full noun gets replaced by a pronoun (anaphoric relationship), or a pronoun gets replaced by a full noun (cataphoric relationship). These examples seem to have in common that the extensions are related to the precise description or identification of a specific referent – a person or object. A first set of cases concerns proper names which are replaced by a more general description (not shown). In other cases, an indefinite pronoun gets replaced by a more precise referent, such as in Example (5). Karel asks about the current situation of his and his friends’ soccer team.

(5)

(HAMR_vývoj_000053)

1 KAR hele,    a  jak ↑to         je teďka; e: teda
      look-imp and how dem-nom.n.sg is  now   er then
      listen and what’s up with that now er:
2     (1.1)
3 KAR ten      vývoj;
      dem-nom.m development[nom.m]
      the development
4     (0.4)
5 IVA .h tak necháme   to      na     nahrávky [khh] .Hh
         so leave-1.pl dem-acc.n  for    recording-acc.f.pl
      .h so let’s keep that for the recordings [khh] .Hh
6 KAR                                          [jo.]
                                               [yes]
7 MAR vývoj              fotbalu?
      development[nom.m] soccer-gen.m
      the soccer development
8 KAR no:,
      yes

Karel’s enquiry contains as referent only the neutral pronoun “to” / “it” (line 1). After more than one second, he replaces “to” by “ten vývoj” / “the development” (line 3). Marcel’s repair initiation (line 7) shows that this first replacement could need yet another precision in order to be fully understood by this recipient.

Another type of replacement concerns elements that have already been mentioned, therefore this type of replacement does seem to cope less with explicit recognition, but rather with the action type of the sequence and possible recipient answer types.

(6)

(CAJ_špaget_002717)

1 MAR  .hh zkusila     sis        někdy:,[n-
           try-pst-f.sg aux.2sg.refl some time
       .hh have you already tried        [n-
2 YVE                                    [zvážit
                                          weigh-inf
                                         [to weigh
3      (.)
4 YVE  [ne
       [no
5 MAR  [zvážit    a   nabrat    na talíř       kolik
        weigh-inf and ladle-inf on plate[acc.m] how much
       to weigh and put on a plate and see how much
6      je     sto     gramů        těsto°vin°,
       is-3sg hundred gram-gen.m.pl noodle[gen.f.pl]
       is one hundred grams of noodles
7      (.)
8 YVE   e[::;
       er[:m
9 MAR    [pro ↑↑zajímavost   jsem   včera    ↑večer, [.h;&
         for interest[acc.f] aux.1sg yesterday evening
         [out of curiosity yesterday evening I’ve    [.h&
10 YVE                                               [°no,°
                                                     [yeah
11 MAR & dětem, .h  nabírala      špagety;
         kids-dat.pl ladle-pst-f.sg spaghetti-acc.f.pl
       & given the kids spaghetti
12     
                                                            sto     gramů        špaget;
       hundred gram-gen.m.pl spaghetti[gen.f.pl]
       one hundred grams of spaghetti
13 YVE no,
       yeah
14     (0.4)
15 MAR .hhh (0.3) e::; Robin         to       sněd (0.2)
                  erm ((name[nom.m])) dem-acc.n eat.up[pst.m]
       .hhh (0.3) erm Robin ate it up (0.2)

Marta is telling Yveta about a nutritionist’s recommendation to eat portions of one hundred grams of carbohydrates per meal (“one hundred grams of noodles”, line 6). As a preliminary to a story, she asks if Yveta knows what this quantity corresponds to when put on a plate (lines 1, 5–6). Marta then starts talking about her experience, i.e., serving this precise quantity to her children for dinner. In her turn, she replaces “spaghetti” with the precise amount, “one hundred grams of spaghetti” (lines 11–12). Yveta’s response after the replacement (line 13) shows that it is perceived as an important element of Marta’s turn and story. Thus, a replacement can also be used in order to format a storytelling and emphasise possible key elements.

2.2.2Increments

When a prosodic break between the host turn and its extension occurs (i.e., add-on), speakers might also add new material. These so-called increments can be grammatically fitted to the host turn (glue-on, 2.2.2.2) or not (insertable, 2.2.2.1), i.e., the latter extensions are syntactically “out of place” compared to a more canonical position.

2.2.2.1Insertables

Insertables seem to be quite rare in Czech. One rather clear example can be seen in Example (7), in which Marcel is talking about a chain of pubs in the UK. He first describes where the type of chain (“síť”) is located – all over Great Britain. After an inbreath he then states more precisely what type of chain it is – a chain of “hospod” / “pubs” (lines 1–2).

(7)

(FOSNA_síť_011157)

1 MAR .Hh voni tam   maj      potom takovou    síť
          they there have.3pl then   such-acc.f net[acc.f]
      .Hh there they have such a chain
2     po    celý     Británii, .Hh hospo:d
      along all-loc.f Britain-loc.f  pub[gen.f.pl]
      all over Britain .Hh of pubs
3     která         je le-  jako levná,
      which-nom.f.sg is che- like cheap-nom.f
      which is somehow cheap

Here, the case marking (“hospod” being the genitive plural of “hospoda”) clearly shows that this item belongs to the noun “síť”. As the canonical position of the modifier in the form of substantive attribute in Czech compounds would be just after the head – in this case “síť hospod” – this is a clear-cut example of an insertable in this language.

In Excerpt (8), Marta and Yveta discuss various nutritional recommendations, here, how many meals one should have per day. Yveta reports what her nutritionist told her (line 1).

(8)

(CAJ_petkrat denne_001705)

1 YVE  ne; mně    říkala,  .hh .tsk e:::m;
       no  me-dat tell-pst-f.3sg      erm
       no she told me .hh .tsk er:m
2 MAR  třikrát     denně?
       three-times daily
       three times a day
3      (0.3)
4 YVE  .hh
5      (0.6)
6 YVE  
                                                                pětkrát;   (.) denně.
       five-times     daily
       five times (.) a day
7      (0.5)
8 MAR  [pětkrát   °denně.°]
        five-times daily
       [five times a day  ]
9 YVE  [°to si° nep-]       až    šestkrát;
        dem-acc.n.sg refl un- up to six-times
       [(this is-)        ] up to six times
10     počkej,     já ti      to-
       wait-imp.2sg I  you-dat dem-acc.n
       wait I will-
11     (0.2)

Yveta corrects Marta’s first guess, three times a day (line 2), to “five times a day” (line 6, regarding the question if “denně” here could be analysed as an extension see the discussion in Section 3.3). She then abandons a possibly new TCU in overlap with Marta and adds “(up) to six times” (line 9). The “až” / “(up) to” shows that these elements are semantically and syntactically connected to her turn in line 6, meaning “pětkrát až šestkrát denně” / “five to six times a day”. The fact that she does not repeat “a day” in line 9 (versus Marta’s repeat line 8 of “denně”) shows that these elements are formatted as an insertable.

2.2.2.2Glue-ons

In our data, glue-ons frequently correspond to prepositional phrases. After a prosodic break, they can state more precisely place, Example (9), time, Example (10), means and manners, persons (“with X”), or different types of measures or quantities, Example (11). The added information is not syntactically compulsory, but fitted to the host TCU. These glue-ons mostly occur after gaps or minimal responses that indicate that these increments might be linked to a missing or inadequate recipient response (Ford, Fox & Thompson 2002Ford, Cecilia E., Barbara A. Fox, and Sandra A. Thompson 2002 “Constituency and the Grammar of Turn Increments.” In The Language of Turn and Sequence, ed. by Cecilia E. Ford, Barbara A. Fox, and Sandra A. Thompson, 14–38. Oxford: Oxford University Press.).

(9)

(SOUSED_Olomouc_001104)

1 JAN tak zítra    jedu;
      so  tomorrow go-1sg
      so tomorrow I go
2     zítra    jedu   v ↑jedenáct vlakem,
      tomorrow go-1sg at eleven   train-ins.m
      tomorrow at eleven I go by train
3     (.)
4 JAN do Olomouce,
      to ((city name-gen))
      to Olomouc

(10)

(HAMR_fotbal_001820)

1 MAR a   ta       desítka         nebyla,     špatná.
      and dem-nom.f number.ten-nom.f neg-is-pst-f bad-nom.f
      and this ((beer type)) was not bad
2     (0.5)
3 MAR po    tom      fotbale;    myslim;
      after dem-loc.m soccer-loc.m think-1sg
      after this soccer match I think

(11)

(CAJ_za480euro_001141)

1 MAR já jsem   si  koupila   ten      super (.) vitamix;
      I  aux.1sg refl buy-pst-f dem-acc.m super    ((brand name[acc]))
      I have bought this super (.) vitamix
2     (0.7)
3 MAR za  štyry sta        osmdesát  euro;
      for four  hundred-acc eighty    euro
      for four hundred-eighty euros
4     to   jsem   nemohla      ani    Petrovi   říct,
      that aux.1sg neg-can-pst-f even ((name-dat)) say-inf
      this I couldn’t even tell Peter

Although non-clausal glue-ons seem to be more frequent, another important group of Czech glue-ons are clausal. These can take on the apparel of different types of finite dependent clauses, e.g. relative clauses (introduced by “což”, “which” / “that”), adverbial clauses (e.g. introduced by “než” / “than”), or noun clauses introduced by “že” / “that”.

2.2.2.3Free constituents

Free constituents do not syntactically depend on the host turn, but do so only semantically and pragmatically (Couper-Kuhlen & Ono 2007Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth, and Tsuyoshi Ono 2007 “ ‘Incrementing’ in Conversation. A Comparison of Practices in English, German and Japanese.” Pragmatics 17: 513–552. , 515). They thus do not represent a new TCU. In our data, we have relatively few instances of this phenomenon. This is the case of the extension “such a (silly) goose” (Example 12, line 6).

(12)

(CAJ_husa_002026)

1 YVE .hh a   pak   jsem si      říkala;  .h   tyjo- .h
          and then  am   refl-dat tell-pst-f.1sg interjection
      .hh and then I told myself .h gosh .h
2     teď už      by          stači↑lo     zmáčknout
      now already aux.cond.3sg suffice-pst-n push-inf
      now it would be enough to push
3     ten      knofl(h)ík; eh::
      dem-acc.m button[acc.m]
      this     b(h)utton eh::
4     a   m(h)ám   p(h)o prst(h)u; °he, hm; hm;°
      and have-1sg after finger-loc.m
      and I w(h)ould l(h)ose my f(h)inger °he, hm; hm;°
5     (.)
6 YVE .hh t(h)akov(h)á husa; .hhh
          such-nom.f    goose-nom.f
      .hh s(h)uch a s(h)illy goose .hhh

Yveta talks about trying to clean the interior of a blender with her hand and her then becoming aware of the risks (lines 1–4). The free constituent (line 6) is added after a last TCU, some laughter particles, and a micro pause. Semantically, the self-deprecating assessment is clearly related to the previously described possible accident, its host, as it is “[…] backwards-looking and dependent on the prior unit for [its] interpretation” (Couper-Kuhlen & Ono 2007Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth, and Tsuyoshi Ono 2007 “ ‘Incrementing’ in Conversation. A Comparison of Practices in English, German and Japanese.” Pragmatics 17: 513–552. , 525).

3.1The difference between replacements and glue-ons in Czech

The main difference between the two add-on types replacement and glue-on is that the former is replacing an element of the host turn, while the latter is adding new information. Grammatically speaking, replacements are co-referential because they explicitly refer to an (obligatory) element of the host turn, while glue-ons are not: they typically contain non-obligatory elements such as prepositional phrases, clauses, or adjectives. While at first sight this distinction seems to be quite clear (see previous examples in 2.2.1 and 2.2.2.2), it becomes less clear-cut when considering cases that contain several TCU extensions in a row. With respect to action format, Example (13) illustrates that chains of syntactic extensions frequently occur in itinerary descriptions (Schegloff 1972Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1972 “Notes on a Conversational Practice: Formulating Place.” In Studies in Social Interaction, ed. by David Sudnow, 75–119. New York: MacMillan, The Free Press.) in which participants formulate a series of places, ranging from more general or larger locations to more specific or smaller ones.

1 MAR ale já většinou:, když jedu   do práce      tak- .hh
      but I  mostly     when go-1sg to  work-gen.f so
      but mainly I      when I go to work then .hh
2     to       mám      přes školu;
      dem-acc.n have-1sg over  school-acc.f
      I’m going past the school
3     že   vodvezu  děti      do školy:
      that take-1sg kid-acc.pl to school-gen.f
      so that I take the kids to school
4     (0.6)
5     do Braníka
      to ((quarter name-gen.m))
      to Braník
6     (0.2)
7     a   pak  z    toho       Braníka
      and then from dem-gen.m ((quarter name-gen.m))
      and then from Braník
8     jedu   tramvají.
      go-1sg tram-ins.f
      I go by tram

Marcel has been asked about his daily travels within Prague. He states that he takes his kids to school, adding after a 0.6 second pause the name of the quarter where the school is situated. Does “to Braník” (line 5) actually replace “to school” (=replacement), or is it rather added in a grammatical continuity, providing new information (=glue-on, i.e., “I take the kids to school to Braník”)? Interestingly, the name of the quarter seems to function as a sort of topological pivot, as Marcel then formulates the next step in this itinerary (from the quarter where his kids go to school to where he works). In cases where the extension is a prepositional phrase using the same preposition, the distinction between replacement and glue-on seems rather difficult.

Another tricky issue regarding the distinction between glue-on and replacement is linked to a grammatical feature of Czech. As Czech is a pro-drop language, subjects can be encoded in the verb only, i.e., they are not obligatorily expressed as full (pro)nouns (Naughton 2005Naughton, James 2005 Czech. An Essential Grammar. London/New York: Routledge., 74). In a previous section, we have already presented cases where demonstratives or pronouns (2.2.1) have been replaced by more precise referents, thus clearly being replacements. If there is a full or dummy noun phrase in the host TCU, the notion of replacement obviously fits. But how should one treat cases where a subject in the host TCU is expressed through morphological features of the verb only, such as in Excerpt (14) (lines 6–8)?

1 YVE  [nejhorší je naloupat a   &
        worst    is peel-inf and
       [the worst part is to peel and &
2 MAR  [°(co)°
       [ (what-acc)
3 YVE  & nakrájet [ty        brambory,=
         cut-inf    dem-nom.pl potato-acc.f.pl
       & to cut   [the potatoes=
4 MAR             [.hhh
5 YVE  =[pak  už      to       je jednoduché;]
         then already dem-nom.n is easy-n
       =[after that it’s easy                ]
6 MAR  [HELE     a  jak  ↑dlouho ti      vydr]°ží°.
        look-imp and how   long   you-dat last-3sg/pl
       [listen and how long can (it/they) be kept]
7      (0.5)
8 MAR  ten      salát.
       dem-nom.m salad[nom.m]
       the salad
9      (.)
10 YVE než  ho       sním;     takže (h)asi
       than him[acc] eat.up-1sg so    maybe
       until I eat it so r(h)ound about
11     tak půl  d(h)ne(H) hehehe,
       so  half day-gen.m
       half a day hehehe

Marta enquires about Yveta’s recipe for potato salad. When Marta asks how long the salad can be kept, the host TCU (line 6) does not contain a clearly expressed referent. As in Czech, finite verbs do not obligatorily have to be accompanied by personal pronouns, only the final morpheme in the verb form “vydrž-í” (line 6) indicates a third person subject (the “it /they” being necessary in the idiomatic English translation only in order to convey the possible syntactic completeness of the Czech original). As in this conjugation type, number is underspecified for the third person, it could also refer to the “brambory” / “potatoes” (line 3). After a short pause, Marta adds “the salad” (line 8), making the subject of the host TCU both explicit and available in post overlap resolution position (Schegloff 2000bSchegloff, Emanuel A. 2000b “Overlapping Talk and the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation.” Language in Society 29 (1): 1–63. ). Should this extension be treated as a glue-on, as it is syntactically fitted to the host utterance and as it adds more information (corresponding to something like “how long can be kept (0.5) the salad”)? In general, a co-reference hints at a replacement (“how long can it be kept (0.5) the salad”), however, how should we treat a co-reference in case of a subject being expressed in a verbal morpheme only (here, the “í” in “vydrž-í” indicating a third person)? In other words, can a noun phrase “replace” a non-expressed – or at least underspecified, as only contained in one morpheme within the verb – referent? Treating this example as a replacement would indeed presuppose the existence of some kind of “zero pronoun”, as has been discussed in case of possible “zero arguments” in Japanese, where the distinction between insertables and replacements seems to meet similar problems (Couper-Kuhlen & Ono 2007Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth, and Tsuyoshi Ono 2007 “ ‘Incrementing’ in Conversation. A Comparison of Practices in English, German and Japanese.” Pragmatics 17: 513–552. , 543).

3.2The difference between glue-ons and insertables

Insertables seem to be rather rare in Czech (cf. 2.2.2.1). In languages with a free word order, the boundaries between glue-ons, i.e., newly added grammatically fitted material, and insertables, i.e., newly added, but grammatically unfitted, “out of place” material, seem to be rather fuzzy. In highly inflectional languages, the perception of some material as syntactically “out of place” seems to be somewhat difficult. In contrast, languages with a rather fixed word order possess potentially clearer syntactic boundaries. If we look at syntactic extensions in German, the concept of “sentence brace” (e.g. Auer 2007Auer, Peter 2007 “Why are Increments such Elusive Objects? An Afterthought.” Pragmatics 17: 647–658. ) seems to make it easier – at least from a rather normative perspective on syntax – to distinguish “well-placed”, i.e., inside the sentence brace, from “out of place” elements, i.e., insertables (see also Couper-Kuhlen & Ono 2007Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth, and Tsuyoshi Ono 2007 “ ‘Incrementing’ in Conversation. A Comparison of Practices in English, German and Japanese.” Pragmatics 17: 513–552. , 542–543 regarding Japanese). In Czech, a sentence brace does not exist, and adjectives, adverbs, or full nouns can be freely positioned (with some clitic elements being bound to specific positions, cf. 1.2). Examples (15) and (16) illustrate some interesting instances of this problem, where an adjective, Example (15), or a noun, Example (16), is in final position. The “@” indicates an alternative position of the final element.

1 NOR i    když má- (.) e dítě      se   Španělem,
      even if   has-3sg   kid[acc-n] with Spaniard-ins.m
      although she has (.) er a child with a Spaniard
2     ale nemá        @    občanst°ví°;       °španělské°
      but neg-has-3sg       citizenship[acc.n] Spanish-adj-acc.n
      she doesn’t have the citizenship (the) Spanish (one)

In Czech, the adjective can be positioned in front of or after the noun it qualifies. Therefore both “občanství španělské” and “španělské občanství” (“Spanish citizenship”) would be possible. Thus, in Czech, the post-positioning of the adjective as such does not indicate if it is a single TCU or a host TCU with an extension, and if – in case of a TCU extension – it would best be treated as a glue-on or an insertable. This is due to the fact that Czech does not have obligatorily expressed articles, which in other languages might indicate a certain type of TCU extension (as conveyed in the idiomatic translation “the citizenship – the Spanish one”), as they are using a retraction to the determiner (e.g. in German, Birkner et al. 2010Birkner, Karin, Sofie Henricson, Camilla Lindholm, et al. 2010 “Retraction Patterns and Self-Repair in German and Swedish Prepositional Phrases.” InLiSt – Interaction and Linguistic Structures 46: 1–32.).

1 JAN jsem ráda;   zatím  se      @ jako drží;   holky
      am   happy-f so far refl-acc @ like hold-3pl girl-acc.f.pl
      I’m happy now (they/@) are like disciplined the girls

In the case of the post-positioned noun “holky” / “girls”, Example (16), although the position indicated by the @ could be described as a more canonical position, both positions would correspond to grammatically correct sentences (and maintain the same scope of “jako”, in this case concerning the verb “drží”). A slightly falling intonation on the verb shows us that the following noun seems indeed to have been added, though there is no clearly perceivable pause between both items. Thus we would have arguments for treating this case either as a glue-on or as an insertable.

We might indeed wonder if the concept of insertable is useful for languages with a free word order – or if it is a useful concept at all. Couper-Kuhlen & Ono (2007Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth, and Tsuyoshi Ono 2007 “ ‘Incrementing’ in Conversation. A Comparison of Practices in English, German and Japanese.” Pragmatics 17: 513–552. , 524) proclaimed insertables to be “vanishingly rare” in their English material, and Horlacher (2015Horlacher, Anne-Sylvie 2015 La dislocation à droite revisitée. Une approche interactionniste. Louvain-la-Neuve: De Boeck , 115) states the same for spoken French. As has been suggested, canonicity of a syntactic construction should thus not be assessed with regards to standard grammar, mostly based on written language, but on frequency in spoken discourse (Couper-Kuhlen & Ono 2007Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth, and Tsuyoshi Ono 2007 “ ‘Incrementing’ in Conversation. A Comparison of Practices in English, German and Japanese.” Pragmatics 17: 513–552. , 524–525). In that sense, one could argue that the final elements in Excerpts (15) and (16) are possibly in a marked position (see also Auer 1991Auer, Peter 1991 “Vom Ende deutscher Sätze.” Zeitschrift für Germanistische Linguistik 19: 139–157. , 147–8 for German), but not necessarily “out of place” and thus insertables. This conceptualisation would also correspond to the traditional description of topical sentence structure in Czech (cf. Cvrček et al. 2010Cvrček, Václav, Vilém Kodýtek, Marie Kopřivová, et al. 2010 Mluvnice současné češtiny. 1: Jak se píše a jak se mluví. Prague: Karolinum.). If one assumes a canonical syntactic structure as opposed to marked ones, the above-mentioned excerpts could be treated as insertables. Grammatically however, they are glue-ons, as they do provide more material in a position of post completion. In that sense, the conceptualisation and distinction of insertables vs. glue-ons largely hinges on the conceptualisation of a more or less standardised syntax of a given language.

3.3TCU continuation vs. TCU extension in Czech

Yet another basic problem when trying to describe various types of syntactic extensions in Czech – also linked to free word order – is how to distinguish simple TCU continuations from TCU extensions such as glue-ons (see also the case of “denně“ in Example 8, line 06). Example 15 (3.2) already illustrates this point quite clearly: is the adjective “Spanish” to be treated as being part of the initial TCU, or rather as an add-on (glue-on)? As both “španělské občanství” and “občanství španělské” would be acceptable, the status of “Spanish” here remains ambiguous with regards to TCU extension. But the falling intonation on “citizenship” as well as the low volume afterwards might indicate that in this case the adjective has indeed been “added”.

A similar problem arises in Example (17) in the case of the adverb “vzteky” / “angrily” (line 1). The lengthening on the noun “display” could hint at the completion of a possible host turn to which then “vzteky” is added.

1 MAR jo HH HI, .HH kousnul       sem    do displeje:;   vzteky;
      yeah          bite-pst.m.1sg aux.1sg to display-gen.m angrily
      yeah HH hi .HH I’ve bitten in the display angrily
2     .HH Hh a   potom- potom už       jako na tom
             and then   then  any more like on dem-m.loc
      .HH Hh and then- then like on this
3     displeji:,   už       nebylo     ↑nic     vidě:t; .hh
      display-loc.m any more neg-is-pst-n nothing see-inf
      display nothing could be seen anymore .hh

A prosodic break can be perceived between the words “displeje” and “vzteky” (line 1). The analysis with PRAAT shows that the intonation decreases during the two final syllables of the word “displeje” by 4.1 semitones and that there is a perceivable vowel lengthening (see Figures 2 and 3). On the other hand, Marcel did not finish the word “displeje” with a descent to the low level of his voice register, and neither did the loudness nor articulation rate decrease significantly – in other words, there do not seem to be enough distinguishable prosodic features for deciding on this adverb’s clear status as add-on or not.

Another grammatical ambiguity can be discovered in Example (18), as “the girls have which citizenship” appears to be a syntactically complete (interrogative) structure. Can a direct object – which seems to be a rather obligatory component when considering the valence of the verb (“to have”) – also be treated as a TCU extension? This view would be also supported by the closing intonation on “jaké”:

1 NOR .h no a   holky        mají-    a
       yeah and girl-nom.f.pl have-3pl and
      .h yeah and the girls have- and
2     holky        mají     jak°é°.    °občanství°
      girl-nom.f.pl have-3pl which-acc.n citizenship[acc.n]
      the girls have which citizenship

This analytical difficulty can be resolved when considering the full sequential context of the turn Example (19). Nora self-selects (line 2) in overlap with Jana’s turn ending (leading to a post-overlap recycling, Schegloff 1987Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1987 “Recycled Turn Beginnings: A Precise Repair Mechanism in Conversation’s Turn-taking Organization.” In Talk and Social Organization, ed. by Graham Button, and John R. E. Lee, 70–85. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.). As we can see, Jana starts responding to Nora’s question right after the lexical item “jaké” (lines 3–4, see also Schegloff 1996Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1996 “Turn Organization: One Intersection of Grammar and Interaction.” In Interaction and Grammar, ed. by Elinor Ochs, Emanuel A. Schegloff, and Sandra A. Thompson, 52–133. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. , 91). This shows that Jana treats Nora’s question as being complete after “jaké” (which in Czech would correspond to a grammatically complete question, i.e., “And the girls have which?”, vs. “And the girls have which citizenship?”). Thus, a final element being in full overlap with a response to this turn indicates here that it could be analysed as an added element (similar to overlapped tag-positioned address-terms described by Jefferson 1973Jefferson, Gail 1973 “A Case of Precision Timing in Ordinary Conversation: Overlapped Tag-Positioned Address Terms in Closing Sequences.” Semiotica IX (1): 47–96.), i.e., a TCU extension (possibly a non-clausal glue-on, see also the omission of “občanství” in Jana’s reply, line 5).

1 JAN [a   potom máš       ňáké pohovory- ]
       and then  have-2sg  some interview-acc.m.pl
      [and then  you have  some interviews]
2 NOR [.h no a   holky        mají-      a]
        yeah and girl-nom.f.pl have-3pl   and
      [.h yeah and the girls     have- and]
3     holky        mají     jaké.      [°občanství°]
      girl-nom.f.pl have-3pl which-acc.n citizenship[acc.n]
      the girls    have     which      [citizenship]
4 JAN                                  [holky      ] maj
                                        girl-nom.f.pl have-3pl
                                       [the girls  ] have
5     pouze °je°nom něme°cké;°
      only  just    German-adj-acc.n
      only the German (one)

The last example does also illustrate the usefulness of embedding syntactic structures within their sequential context. If isolated from its sequential context, Yveta’s turn in Excerpt (20) (line 1) would be possibly ambiguous. Is the prepositional phrase “v mikrovlnce” / “in the microwave” part of the host / initial TCU or an extension?

1 MAR vo- (.) vohřej         trošičku[:, v  mi]krovlnce,
      he-     heat.up-imp.2sg little      in microwave-loc.f
      he- (.) heat it up a little    [in the mi]crowave
2 YVE                                [jo;      ]
                                     [yes      ]
3     (.)
4 YVE jo;
      yes

First, Yveta complies (line 2) with Marta’s request to warm up the milk for her coffee. When Marta states more explicitly how she should warm up the milk (“in the microwave”), Yveta responds a second time (line 4). Although the prosodic features are less clear-cut (no clear pause before the add-on, rising intonation), the addressee’s reactions can show that “v mikrovlnce” is indeed an add-on (in this case a glue-on), as both the host and the add-on are responded to – or rather are treated by Yveta as elements that are in need of separate responses. Although one might argue that this type of analysis works obviously well in cases where there indeed is a first response to the host TCU and then a second one to its extension, these examples certainly hint at the potential of a detailed sequential analysis for better understanding and classifying TCU continuations and TCU extensions.