Abstract:
Turn-taking is a condition in which the speakers who are involved in a
conversation take turns to speak. When people have a conversation, they should
understand the strategy or manage the conversation to run well and smoothly.
Therefore, the US presidential final debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden
is taken as the object of this study. There are two problems in this study. First is
the type of Turn-Taking strategies applied in the debaters, and second is why the
debaters applied those Turn-Taking strategies. The purpose of this study is to
describe the answer to the research problems in this study. This study used a
descriptive qualitative method, and the source of this study is from the
presidential debate transcription taken from the internet. The researcher found 201
utterances that were categorized as Turn-Taking strategies. All of the data were
divided into three types. There are ten types of Turn-Taking strategies used by
Donald Trump and Joe Biden in the US presidential final debate are (1) Taking
the Turn Strategy-Taking over (TTS-TO), (2) Holding the Turn Strategy-New
Start (HTS-NS), (3) Yielding the Turn-Appealing (YT-A), (4) Taking the Turn
Strategy-Interrupting- Meta Comment (TTS-I-MC), (5) Holding the Turn
Strategy- Filled pause and verbal fillers (HTS-FPVF), (6) Taking the Turn
Strategy- Interrupting-Alert (TTS-I-A), (7) Taking the Turn Strategy-Overlapping
(TTS-O), (8) Taking the Turn Strategy-Starting Up (TTS-SU), (9) Yielding the
Turn-Prompting (YT-P), and (10) Holding the Turn Strategy- Lexical Repetition
(HTS-LR). The reasons why they used the Turn-Taking are: (1) Donald Trump or
Joe Biden wanted to control or hold the turns all the time, (2) This strategy may
be taken to give Donald Trump or Joe Biden some time to plan what to say and
speak, (3) Donald Trump or Joe Biden while planning and preparing for the
following points they wanted to proceed, made brief stop half way of their turn,
then continued throughout the turn.
