Turn-Taking Strategies in The Final Presidential Debate Between Donald Trump and Joe Biden

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.