Is pre-meeting talk meeting talk or mundane conversation?

In their seminal paper, Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974) propose two parameters to investigate turn-taking of speech-exchange systems, namely turn-construction and turn-allocation. Drawing on their model, meeting talk and mundane conversation are characterized as two different speech-exchange systems (e.g. Boden 1994).However, much of the meeting talk literature is mainly concerned with the interaction that occurs between meeting openings and closings but regards interaction taking place in the pre-meeting and post-meeting sections as non-meeting talk. However, it is very common to see people interacting with each other when they are waiting for a meeting to start. It would be interesting to see whether the turn-taking features of pre-meeting talk are similar to those of meeting talk or to those of mundane conversation.Drawing on recordings of business meetings in two companies in Hong Kong and New Zealand, the study shows that there are considerable similarities between pre-meeting talk and mundane conversation in terms of topic development, turn construction and turn allocation. However, when the meeting is about to start, certain constraints on, for example, topic development and turn allocation are observed that may distinguish this type of talk from mundane conversation. Findings suggest that pre-meeting talk can be considered as a transition from mundane conversation to meeting talk as the interaction proceeds.