According to Cambridge Dictionary (2019), relevance refers

to the degree to which something is related or useful to what

is happening or being talked about. For something to be relevant,
there are a lot of factors that are necessary to consider; to
whom, for what, when and why.
In Chapter 1 “Theorizing Gender in Sociolinguistics and
Linguistic Anthropology – When Gender is Relevant”, this
examines on when and how gender division is significant and
relevant. Thorne (1990) asserted that "to express core truths:
that boys and girls are separate and fundamentally different as
individuals and as groups. They help[ed] sustain a sense of
dualism in the face of enormous variation and complex
circumstances". But the "truth," she argues, turned out to be
much more complex: we need, she maintains, to understand when
gender is largely irrelevant, and when it seems central, when
gender is marked and when it is unmarked, for it is only in
"developing a sense of the whole and attending to the waning as
well as the waxing of gender salience [that] we can specify not
only the social relations that uphold but also those that
undermine the construction of gender as binary opposition"
(Mcelhinny, 2008). The researchers strongly agree with these
claims because gender divisions or separations are sometimes
necessary, however, one must know when gender divisions are
largely irrelevant and unnecessary. In this section, particular
situations and concerns were given to undermine when gender is
relevant or not.
Moreover, it was said that the principle of relevance means
that "CA transcripts of talk pay little attention to social
relations and to what other approaches call 'social context,'
e.g. social identities of participants, setting, personal
attributes, and so on. By intentionally ignoring what are often
assumed to be static features of a social world . . . CA reflects
. . . the ethnomethodological avoidance of premature
generalizations and idealizations" (Schiffrin 1994: 235).
It states that the conversational analyst doesn’t give much
emphasis or importance to social context but rather s/he tries
to avoid any premature generalizations and idealizations. Like
for instance, the series of studies of interruptions by Candace
West and Don Zimmerman. It argues that men interrupt women more
frequently than women interrupt men (West and Zimmerman, 1983).
In this study by Bonnie Mcelhinny, she state that Schegloff’s
argue that the problem on the said former study is that it is
not at all clear that the characterizations which the
investigator makes are those which are grounded in the
participants’ own orientations in the interaction. Although,
this may be true, there are still instances where men really
interrupt women to dominate the conversation. Tannen (1989)
stated that men speak to determine and achieve power and status.
Women talk to determine and achieve connection. It means that
for men, the world is a competitive place in which conversation
and speech are used to build status, whereas for women, it is a
system of connections, and that they use language to seek and
offer support. It can be implied from Tannen’s statement that
men unconsciously interrupt women because in nature, they want
to dominate the conversation. In addition, a study of Adrienne
Hancock on 2014, a linguist at George Washington University,
supports the claim that men interrupt women more frequently than
women interrupt men. It was said that if a man’s conversational
partner was female, he logged an average of 2.1 interruptions
over the course of a three-minute dialogue; if his counterpart
was male, however, that number dropped to 1.8. Women, too, were
less likely to interrupt men than to cut off other women. In
each conversation, women interrupted an average of 2.9 times if
their partner was female, and just once if their partner was
male.
These claims clearly support that gender division is
necessary to determine and know that truths or reality.
However, Tannen (1990) added another stand on interruptions
in conversations. She states that an interruption has little to
do with beginning to make verbal sounds while someone else is
speaking, which she calls Overlap. It has to do with dominance,
control, and showing a lack of interest or support. When a person
does not offer support to a fellow conversant but makes an effort
to wrench control of the topic of conversation, Tannen calls it
Uncooperative Overlap. To further explain, interruption is not
a mechanical criterion for determining on a tape whether two
voices were speaking at once. As linguist Adrian Bennett states,
it is "a matter of interpretation regarding individuals' rights
and obligations" (Tannen, p. 190). In order to determine whether
one speaker is interrupting another, one must be familiar with
both speakers and the situation surrounding their conversation.
What is their relationship? How long have they been talking? How
do they feel about being cut off? Interruptions in conversations
can also indicated that both the interlocutors are close enough
to interrupt one another.
Just like how interruptions in conversations differ in
meaning and context, another example of this is the use of tag
questions- it could be sometimes a way of mitigating a harsh
utterance, or indicating tentativeness, or eliciting
contributions from a silent or isolated person.
References:

1. https://dictionary.cambridge.org 2019

2. Jan 3, 2017, 05:55pm

Gal Interrupted, Why Men Interrupt Women And How To Avert This
In The Workplace

https://www.forbes.com LESLIE SHORE