Abstrakt
Speech overlaps are viewed as a situation in spoken unprepared conversation, when at least two speakers speak simultaneously. Our paper follows the definition of one type of simultaneous speech, called interruption [1].
It can be viewed as violations of the turn-taking system rules. Although it may seem that overlaps are chaotic and disorganized, previous studies has tried to classify them.
One of the classification [3] distinguishes cooperative and competitive overlaps. The first type expresses a supportive agreement and signalizes "I still listen to you".
The second type has disruptive character, because the overlapper wants to diverse attention to another topic or to express his opinion. Both types can signalize sociological status of speakers or relationship between overlapper and overlappee.
The aim of our paper is a research of speech overlaps between two Czech speakers with regard to gender. Some previous studies [2] showed that women make slightly more speech overlaps than men.
However, [1] found more interruptions by male speakers. Besides the comparison of overlap types in the same-sex and cross-sex pairs, we focus on lexis and frequency of overlaps with regard to conversation topic.
The research is based on spoken corpus data; both quantitative and qualitative approaches will be applied.