Defining English Conversational Increments: Problems and Resolutions

The conversational increment is a recently discovered phenomenon.Regardless of the complexity and diversity of daily conversation, previous studies mainly define increments by their syntactic features alone, which leads to a great controversy in delineation.The present study proposes that the defining of conversational increments should take into consideration their linear, syntactic, prosodic and pragmatic features together, with the pragmatic relations between increments and their previous utterances as the most important defining feature.