The teacher asks a question in the first line that invites information about the story’s
plot. Ciara designs her response initially with a determiner followed by a short silence
that is not interrupted before production of the lexical item. The pause after ‘a’
affords her the opportunity to continue to produce ‘fishing’, albeit with brief
hesitation before the final morphological unit ‘-ing' At this point the noun phrase
remains semantically incomplete and another short silence ensues (line 3). Following
the silence T participates in the search with a repeat of C’s lexical item, designed with
a final stretched sound and C completes her TCU.
As the verbal output of Ciara’s turn at line 2 is so brief, what additionally signals to
the teacher that assistance is required? Let us turn our attention to the direction and
timing of the child’s shift of gaze. At line 2 she is looking down at the book where she
has drawn her story characters. What changes at line 3 is that she shifts her gaze,
during the onset of the silence, directly towards the teacher who is seated opposite her
across the table. The result of this shift of orientation is that C now positions T to take
the turn and, indeed, T does so by producing a repetition of ‘fishing’. ’Simultaneously,
Ciara makes good use of prosodic resources at lines 2 and 5. Relative to the pitch
range of surrounding talk, C’s production of the determiner ‘a’ is at a relatively low
pitch height, followed by mid pitch with rising contour on ‘fishing’. The pitch rise on
fishing does the work of signalling that there is more to follow and, when taken in
conjunction with the incomplete semantic phrase, as if turn holding. What follows is
at line 5, produced with a closing contour on ‘ne:t’ that returns to a lower pitch height.
‘Ne:t’ is thus hearable as being prosodically integrated with C’s prior turn ‘a fishing’
since they share the same intonation contour. The loudness on 'ne:t' is also of interest
since it is out of line with typical rendition of ‘fishing net’ where ‘fishing’ would be
12