On the design and use of pivots in everyday English conversation

In everyday English conversation, talk can be produced such that it is simultaneously a grammatical ending of what precedes it, and a beginning of what follows (e.g. ‘‘that’s what I’d like to have is a fresh one’’). A range of features of phonetic design (including pitch, loudness, duration, and articulatory characteristics) are shown to be deployed in systematic ways in order to handle the dual tasks of avoiding the signaling of transition relevance at the end of the pivot, and marking out the fittedness of the pivot to both what precedes and what follows. Turns built with pivots are found to be most often engaged in assessing, enquiring, or reporting, though their more general application as a practice for the continuation of a turn past a point of possible syntactic and pragmatic completion is emphasized.