The notion of Turn-Constructional Unit (TCU) in
Conversation Analysis has become unclear for many researchers.
The underlying problems inherent in the definition of this
notion are here identified, and a possible solution is
suggested. This amounts to separating more clearly the
notions of TCU and Transition Relevance Place (TRP). In
this view, the TCU is defined as the smallest interactionally
relevant complete linguistic unit, in a given context,
that is constructed with syntactic and prosodic resources
within their semantic, pragmatic, activity-type-specific,
and sequential conversational context. It ends in a TRP
unless particular linguistic and interactional resources
are used to project and postpone the TRP to the end of
a larger multi-unit turn. This suggestion tries to spell
out some of the assumptions that the seminal work in CA
made in principle, but never formulated explicitly.
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