MANAGING TIME AT CONFERENCES: TURNS OF PARTICIPANTS

Time management practice is a hard and emotional topic in the intercultural communication with Russians, and conferences are not an exception. Nowadays, conferences held in Russian are gradually coming to the general standard of time-management and acquiring temporal-sequential ordering abilities. Contrarily to the previous times when the interest in the concrete speaker, importance of his talk and devotion to the matter defined the length of the turn, a more democratic way of scheduling papers is progressively taking place in the modern meetings. Pictures with the quantity of minutes left remain a rare tool. The article reveals typical and untypical ways of organizing events from the verbal point of view, as well as turn taking between moderator, presenter and audience. The data was collected at dozens of Russian conferences in humanities. Real dialogues and replies serve as basis for analysis. Discussions upon responsibilities of participants demonstrate how speakers and listeners express their opinions about working out and monitoring schedules.