Nuanced elaboration as alignment reworking: Turn-final but in post-response design

Kazuki Hata
Tokyo City University

Alignment is not always settled when a response first becomes available. Speakers may produce an initially ‘good-enough’ response that makes progression relevant, even though its uptake remains under-specified as the sequence unfolds. One post-response elaboration format ends with English turn-final but, re-specifying the response’s import for the emerging trajectory and often followed by silence. This post-but silence provides a juncture that can be treated as open-ended: participants may move on, pursue further specification, or let the talk lapse. Drawing on twenty-five instances from approximately sixty-seven hours of interaction, this paper shows how alignment is reworked through these but-ending elaborations. The findings contribute to conversation-analytic accounts of alignment as an accomplishment achieved across turns rather than a single-turn outcome, and to research on turn-final but.

Publication history

Date received: 22 February 2019

Date accepted: 10 April 2026

Published online: 29 October 2026

Table of contents

Turn construction has been approached as a sequentially unfolding accomplishment of action. On a turn-by-turn basis, speakers accomplish social actions with grammatical resources by placing linguistic units in particular positions and configurations (Auer 2005). As Goodwin (1979) puts it, the temporality and projection of grammar are not fixed but are continually adjusted in relation to what has been produced and what becomes relevant next. In this sense, grammar emerges in the real time of interaction and is locally accomplished within situated contexts (Hopper 2011).

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