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The facework of unfinished turns in French conversation

UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM, UK, fabienne.chevalier{at}nottingham.ac.uk

In this article, I consider the notion of facework in the context of unfinished turns in French conversation. Unfinished turns in French conversation normally occur in the environment of talk that can be characterized as delicate or problematic. They provide a mechanism for dealing with such talk in a way that both manages misalignment and divergence between the participants and minimizes possible threats to the participants' face. They provide a subtle avoidance or minimization mechanism in that they enable the participants to hint at what remains unarticulated, whilst registering enough of the type of actions that they seek to accomplish. I conclude that, although unfinished turns can be seen as one way in which participants engage in facework, their analysis suggests that only an interactional-sequential account reveals the work that they accomplish, and insists upon a conceptualization of face/facework as interactional.

Key Words: avoidance • conversation analysis • face • facework • French conversation • hinting • unfinished turns

Discourse Studies, Vol. 11, No. 3, 267-284 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/1461445609102443


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