USING COMPLETION TO FORMULATE A STATEMENT COLLECTIVELY

We describe how participants in an interaction use completions of each others' talk to bind themselves to a collective formulation of a matt er in hand. In a corpus of problem-oriented discussions among groups o f two or three people, we find speakers using sequences of completable utterance - putative completion - ratification to put their formulati ons of a problem-solution on a joint footing (a participant status tha t adds 'collective author' to Levinson's catalogue of producer footing s). We describe the use of the completion sequence, and show how there are variations in its ratification stage (including explicit acceptan ce, repeating and reshaping).