In previous chapters, the CSF is presented as a “black box” that encapsulates the rules and workings of the contest. This chapter explains the mechanisms behind this black box. This could include how efforts may translate, with some uncertainty, into performance, or a planner with given objectives such as designing a contest on television or procuring inputs for a firm. Additionally, the outcome of a conflict may be negotiated or decided by a jury once claims have been presented. Finally, the chapter explores the basic properties that a contest must have, such as the relationship between effort and probability of winning, and how these properties translate into different CSFs. This is known as the axiomatic approach. These different approaches are able to recover some of the main CSFs already presented in the previous chapter.

This chapter provides an in-depth analysis of the resources Southeast Asian and Caribbean speakers of English use to claim or hold a turn at talk. Four larger strategy groups are described and compared: latches and overlaps, phonetic resources, lexical resources, and syntactic strategies. The chapter describes how these are realised by the individual speaker groups and compares this to previous research on Inner Circle Englishes. It can be shown that speaker groups essentially have access to the same set of resources but exhibit different preferences with respect to which strategies they prefer for organising turn-taking in conversational interaction.