Language at work 

Edelsky

Edelsky (1981)

Defines floor as a specific type of speaking turn which contains the 'acknowledged what's

going-on within a psychological time/space'.

In the second part of the thesis both the floor ideas of Parker and Edelsky are applied to

meeting corpora to see if the theory is appropriate for modelling floor in conversation. Parkers

floor model is easy to apply and describes the sequence of speaking turns, but it ignores some

important aspects of conversation. The application of Edelsky’s floor ideas gives a better

insight in the flow of conversation. It distinguishes different types of utterances and makes it possible to distinguish a ‘main’ conversation flow from background speech.

Based on the floor ideas of Edelsky a floor annotation scheme is developed. The scheme

consists of two main categories to distinguish between utterances that are or are not part of the

floor. Also some subcategories are distinguished to gain more insight into how a floor is

established and which floor transitions occur in a conversation. The floor annotation is

evaluated using a reliability analysis based on the annotations of three annotators. It turned

out that the reliability of the scheme was relatively low, but may be improved by merging two

floor categories that were often confused.

Finally the relation between gestures and floors is analysed. Not all floor transitions are

accompanied with gestures, but floor giving as well as floor capturing gestures could be used

as cues for floor transitions.