The empirical focus of this paper is a conversational turn-taking phenomenon in which conjunctions produced immediately after a point of possible syntactic and pragmatic completion are treated by co-participants as points of possible completion and transition relevance. The data for this study are audio-video recordings of 5 unscripted…

Reports the results of three experiments investigating comprehension and memory for slang metaphors. The experiments examine the thesis that the special pragmatic properties of slang should make these metaphorical expressions easy to understand and remember, especially since speakers frequently share information about the conventional meaning of…