2020 4th International Conference on Economics, Management Engineering and Education Technology (ICEMEET 2020)

Power Relations in the Homecoming from the Perspective of Turn-Taking

Strategies
Jianmin Zhao, Zongqin Sun
School of Foreign Languages, Baoshan University, Baoshan, Yunnan Province, China

Keywords: The homecoming, Discourse analysis, Power relations, Turn-taking

Abstract: In recent years, more and more people have realized that language plays an important
role in their daily lives. Taking the British playwright Harold Pinter’s play-The Homecoming as
corpus, the present paper is designed to investigate the inter-relationship between language and
power in social interactions, specifically, how participants of a community use discursive strategy to
achieve their own power from the perspective of turn-taking strategies.

1. Introduction
American linguist Zellig Harris first introduced the term “discourse analysis” in his article
“Discourse Analysis” which was published in The Journal of Language in 1952. A decade later,
discourse analysis became an independent research subject. Since then, the subject in question
attracted the attention of scholars from different research fields throughout the world, and at present,
discourse analysis has developed into an inter-disciplinary subject.
In recent years, more and more people have realized that language plays an important role in
their daily lives. Accordingly, research on discourse and society, specifically, discourse and gender,
discourse and race, discourse and cross-culture communication, to name only a few, have been
conducted by scholars. Taking the British playwright Harold Pinter’s play-The Homecoming as
corpus, the present dissertation is designed to investigate the inter-relationship between language
and power in social interactions.
There are various definitions of power, among which Weber is a commonly accepted one: “in a
social relationship, power is the chance that one could achieve his or her will against others’
resistance.”[1] Kedar studied power and discourse in his Power through Discourse and defined
discursive power as “resource to achieve one’s goal in a conversation”.[2] Foucault also regarded
power as a kind of resource in discourse. He pointed out that “where is discourse, there is power,
and power determines the process of discourse.”[3] However, power is not fixed, and it is constantly
changing in social interactions. The present paper explores how participants of a community use
discursive strategy to achieve their own power from the perspectives of turn-taking strategies.

2. Turn-Taking Mechanism
The concept of turn-taking was first introduced by Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974) in their
joint work A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-taking for Conversation. According
to Sacks et al, the basic unit of conversation is a turn, and participants of a conversation would
speak interactively in turns instead of doing monologue by one of them.[4] As far as the construction
of turns is concerned, Fasold (2000) argues that turns are constructed of, for English at least, word
phrases, clauses, and sentences.[5]
In appreciating drama, turn-taking patterns may help us to understand the plot development and
character relations. During the past decades, turn-taking mechanism was frequently applied in
dramatic studies. Li Huadong and Yu Dongming (2001) studied power relations, characterization,
and plot development from the perspective of turn-taking.[6]
In this research, a few variables of the turn-taking mechanism are considered, including initiation
and control of topics, turn length, turn type, and turn control strategies. Topic refers to the content of
a conversation. A play usually contains many topics, and there would be a main topic and a few
Copyright © (2020) Francis Academic Press, UK 421 DOI: 10.25236/icemeet.2020.083
related subtopics in each episode. According to Herman, “initiation can signal power, the reality of
attentiveness and eagerness to contribute to speech.”[7] Turn length is another typical variable of the
turn taking system. A speaker’s turn length can be identified as the total length of all his turns in his
production of a certain text. As Herman pointed, “hyper-dominant speaker may claim turn-length
disproportionately to signal power.” [7] Turn type is the third variable of turn-taking mechanism in
the present research. It can be classified as initiative turns and responsive turns, and it is of certain
value in revealing power relations of the characters. The last variable of turn-taking mechanism in
the present research is turn control strategies. There are many ways to control a turn, including
pre-sequence, space-making strategies, paralinguistic features (e.g. facial expression, gestures,
silence, and etc.), monologues, and interruptions. In this thesis, interruptions, monologues, and
silence are selected as the research target for the convenience of data recording.
The following part is a detailed analysis of the conversations of three groups of characters from
the perspective of turn-taking strategies.

3. Power Struggles from the Perspective of Turn-Taking Strategies

3.1 Power Struggle between Father and Sons
The first group of characters is father and sons. There are four characters involved in this group,
namely, Max, Teddy, Lenny, and Joey.
Table 1 Turn-Taking Strategies of the Conversation between Max and Lenny
MAX LENNY
(Father) (Son)
Total turns 31 17 14
Initiation of topics 3 1
Turn type Initiatives 9 5
Responsives 9 12
Turn length(words) Total length 651 168
Turn taking and control strategies Average turn length 38 12
Interruptions 0 3
Monologues 2 0
Silence 1 5
The conversation in question is between Max and Lenny from ACT ONE. It happens at the very
beginning of the play. The turn-taking strategies in table 1 indicate the power relations between
these two characters and how they use language to seek and defend their own power.
Max is supposed to be more powerful than the son Lenny, which can be proved through the total
turns, initiation of topics, turn type, and turn length of Max. For example, among the total four
topics, Max initiated 3 of them; Max also initiated more turns than Lenny, and Lenny is responding
for his father for most of the time; and Max speaks a lot more than Lenny. Besides, Max initiates
more turns than Lenny. It seems that max is guiding the conversation, but the true situation is
something else. For many times, Lenny simply does not respond to his father. For example, when
Max asks for the scissors, he initiated three questions but only receives one response from Lenny.
All of the above mentioned information proves that Max, as the father, still enjoys certain power
over his son, Lenny. However, Max’s power is gradually declining before his grown up son.
For Lenny, he also has a desire to defend his own power against his old man. In responding
Max’s long, tedious monologues, Lenny uses either silence strategy or interruption strategy to
secure his own solidarity. For example, when Max makes his first monologue, Lenny keeps silent to
avoid being involved into Max’s conversation.
To sum it up, turn-taking patterns in the conversation between Max and Lenny reveal the power
relations between Max and Lenny. Both of them have the desire to strengthen their own power. The
father will not give up his dominance in the family easily; on the other hand, the son would never
surrender his solidarity.

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3.2 Power Struggle between Brothers
The second group of characters is brothers. There are five characters involved in this group,
namely, Max and Sam; Teddy, Lenny, and Joey. In this part, linguistic conflicts of two brothers will
be discussed from the perspective of turn-taking.
Table 2 Turn-Taking Strategies of the Conversation between Max and Sam
MAX SAM
Total turns(20) 10 10
Initiation of topics 1 0
Turn type Initiatives 6 3
Responsives 2 6
Turn length Total length 365 58
(words) Average turn length 36 6
Turn taking and control strategies Interruptions 0 0
Monologues 2 0
Silence 0 2
The conversation in question is between Max and Sam from ACT ONE. It happens between Max
and his brother Sam in the other morning when Teddy and Ruth came back. Max is the elder brother
of Sam, a bachelor. The relationship between these two characters is typical status unequals.
Although they inherit the house from their parents together, Max always regards Sam as a lodger of
his own house. To this, Sam does not reject strongly, and it seems that Sam accepts that max is the
owner the house. As a result, Sam is quite submissive to Max.
The above mentioned conversation between Max and Sam contains only one topic, which is
initiated by Max. Different from the conversation between Max and Lenny, in which Max could not
maintain and finish his topics, Max has a complete control over his topic. The only topic here is
about Max’s questioning on Sam’s behaviour. When Max gets up, he finds Sam is doing something
in the kitchen. Then, Max starts to put forward questions to Sam. Their conversation does not stop
until Max satisfies himself.
From table 2, we can find that Max initiated far more turns than Sam does. This time, Sam gives
immediate and direct responses to Max’s initiatives, which shows Max’s complete dominance over
his younger brother.
Turn length of the two characters also indicates their unequal power relations. The average turn
length of Max reaches about 36 words, while the average turn length of Sam is only 6 words. Most
of Max’s turns are questions and lectures to Sam. On the other hand, Sam gives direct and concise
responses to his brother’s questions and lectures.
We know that participants of any conversations would not easily give up their power. Instead of
it, they would try everything to seek and maintain their power. However, in this case, Sam seems to
have few choices to make. When Max gives monologues to lecture on Sam, unlike what he does
when speaks with his son Lenny, he leaves no chance for Sam to get involved. For Sam, he does not
have the courage, or we may say that he is not powerful enough to interrupt Max. In response to
Max’s aggressive lecturing, he can only keep silent now and then in order to maintain his last
solidarity.
It can be concluded that, between complete status unequals, the more powerful participant still
enjoys many choices in using turn-taking strategies to consolidate his power, while the less
powerful side has few choices in doing so.
3.3 Power Struggle between Male and Female Characters
The third group of characters is male and female characters. There are six characters involved in
this group, namely, Max, Sam, Teddy, Lenny, Joey, and Ruth. The following part will investigate the
same topic by analyzing conversations between male and female.

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 Table 3 Turn-Taking Strategies of the Conversation between Teddy and Ruth
Teddy Ruth
(husband) (wife)
Total turns 23 12 11
Initiation of topics 1 0
Turn type Initiatives 3 5
Responsives 10 3
Turn length Total length 241 56
(words) Average turn length 20 5
Turn taking and control strategies Interruptions 0 0
Monologues 0 0
Silence 0 0
The conversation in question is between Teddy and Ruth from ACT TWO.
Teddy and Ruth are husband and wife. However, the husband does not hold a higher status in
their relationship. The two characters are largely independent with each other, and they can be
considered as status equals. Their conversation takes place after Teddy is annoyed by his father and
brothers.
The topic of this conversation is put forward by Teddy. He suggests that they go back to the
United States immediately. Although the topic is initiated by Teddy and they keep conversing on
this topic, the direction of the conversation is not controlled by Teddy.
We may find that Ruth actually initiated more turns in this conversation and she controls the
ongoing conversation. Soon after Teddy initiated his suggestion, Ruth takes over the topic, and
keeps asking Teddy for reasons to get back so early.
It seems that Teddy gains an upper hand in this conversation since his average turn length is
greatly longer than that of Ruth’s. However, if we look into the content of this conversation, it is not
difficult to find out that Teddy has longer turn length because he has to answer Ruth’s questions and
explain himself.
At last, we may say that, by taking control of the topic timely, Ruth gains an upper hand in the
conversation with his husband. At the same time, their conversation proves that conversation
participants with a longer turn length does not necessarily more powerful than their counterparts.

4. Conclusion
The present part analyzes the conversations of a father and his son, Max and Lenny, two brothers,
Max and Sam, and a husband and his wife, Teddy and Ruth, from the perspective of turn-taking
strategies. The first conversation is between an old man whose power is declining and a grown up
son whose power is strengthening. During their discursive conflict for power, the father tries a lot of
initiative turns and monologues in order to maintain his dominance over his son. At the same time,
the son uses interruptions and silence to defend his solidarity. The second conversation is between
two brothers, and they are typical status unequals. It shows that between complete status unequals,
the more powerful participant still enjoys many choices in using turn-taking strategies to
consolidate his power, while the less powerful side has few choices in doing so. The third
conversation is between two participants of different gender, they enjoy a relatively equal status
with each other. In this case, actual application of turn-taking strategies would greatly determine the
result of the linguistic engagement.
Together, the three conversations also reveal that: firstly, the more powerful participant is more
likely to initiate a topic, but we have to make sure if he or she can maintain and finish the topic
successfully; secondly, the more powerful participant usually initiates more turns in a conversation,
but we have to check the other party’s responses in order to see how much influence he or she can
exert against his or her counterpart; thirdly, the more powerful participant normally has longer turn
length, However, the one with longer turn length does not necessarily enjoys greater power. At last,
silence is the sign of a less powerful participant.
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References
[1] Weber, M. Political Writings (3rd edition), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003,
pp.37-45.
[2] Kedar, L. Power through Discourse, New York: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1987, pp. 89-97.
[3] Foucault, M. The Order of Discourse, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984, pp. 108-138.
[4] Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. A., Jefferson, G. A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of
Turn-taking In Conversation. Language, vol.50, no. 4, pp. 696-735, 1974.
[5] Fasold, R. The Sociolinguistics of Language, Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research
Press, 2000, pp. 57-71.
[6] Li, H.D., Yu, D.M. Power Relations and Characters from the Perspective of Turn-taking. Journal
of the PLA Foreign Languages Institute, no.2, pp. 26-30, 2001.
[7] Herman, V. Dramatic Discourse: Dialogue as Interaction in Plays, London: Routledge, 1995,
pp.43-56.

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