Extending the notion of pragmatic completion: The case of the responsive compound action unit Heidi Kevoe-Feldman a, *, Jeffrey D. Robinson b , Jenny Mandelbaum c a Department of Communication Studies, Northeastern University, 204 Lake Hall, 360 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115, United States b Department of Communication, Portland State University, United States c Department of Communication, Rutgers University, United States 1. Introduction Our understanding of the rules for conversational turn taking (Sacks et al., 1974) have significantly contributed to our understanding of social organization. One of these rules is that, once a person gains the right to speak, they are normally entitled to produce a single unit of talk (e.g., a word, phrase, clause and sentence), and that their turn comes to a place of possible completion after that of the unit. 1 However, conversation analysis (CA) has long recognized that, and attempted to describe how, this normal entitlement can be modified by a variety of exigencies associated with grammar (Betz, 2008), prosody (Ford and Thompson, 1996; Local and Walker, 2004; Schegloff, 1998), and, relevant to the present article, pragmatics (Ford and Thompson, 1996; Jefferson, 1991; Levinson, 1983, 2000; Robinson, in press). Within CA, pragmatic elements are commonly tied to the structure of social action, per se (for review, see Ford and Thompson, 1996). The present article is concerned with how a sequence-initiating action can uniquely structure the character of a responsive action such that it is normally constituted by multiple, particular, ordered sentential units, and thus this article is concerned with how a sequence-initiating action can uniquely structure participants’ understandings of what constitutes a possibly complete ‘unit’ of talk (see Selting, 2000). Specifically, we demonstrate that a particular type of initiating action makes conditionally relevant Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 3844–3859 ARTICLE INFO Article history: Received 17 May 2011 Received in revised form 25 September 2011 Accepted 3 October 2011 Available online 1 November 2011 Keywords: Compound action Conversation analysis Customer service Sequence Turn taking Initiating actions ABSTRACT An important rule of turn taking is that, once a person gains the right to speak they are normally entitled to produce a single unit of talk, such as a single word, phrase, clause, or sentence. Conversation analysis has long recognized that, and attempted to describe how, this normal entitlement can be modified by pragmatic exigencies. Along these lines, this article demonstrates that a particular type of initiating action (referred to as a status inquiry) makes conditionally relevant a particular type of compound action unit (Lerner, 1991) that minimally contains two ordered pieces of information, each of which occupies at least one sentential unit. Data are audiotapes of 193 calls between one of five customer- service representatives and customers calling an electronics organization to check on the status of equipment that they have previously sent in for repair. This article contributes to our understanding of how pragmatic concerns can uniquely structure participants’ understandings of what constitutes a possibly complete ‘unit’ of talk, as well as ‘allowable’ places for speakership. ß 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. * Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 973 223 5918; fax: +1 617 373 8533. E-mail address: h.kevoefeldman@neu.edu (H. Kevoe-Feldman). 1 For various elaborations on the notion of turn constructional unit, see Ford (2001a), Lerner (1991), Selting (2000), and Schegloff (2006). Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Journal of Pragmatics journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma 0378-2166/$ – see front matter ß 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2011.10.003