Why are increments such elusive objects? An afterthought

Abstract

It is argued that the type of unit expansions called ‘increments’ by Schegloff 1996 is too narrowly focused on English. While the structure of English makes it particularly suited for this kind of expansion, a typologically more satisfactory approach to unit expansion runs into problems if it remains on the syntactic plane alone. A full typology will have to take into account, not only prosody and semantics, but also action structure and pragmatics at large.