8.1 The sequential nature of conversational units

appraisal of conversation analysis by anthropologists and other social scientists who have objected to what they see as a “narrow” focus of interest and a lack of proper deployment of ethnographic methods.

8.1The sequential nature of conversational units

From the beginning, conversation analysts shared with Malinowski, Austin, Searle, and Wittgenstein the view that talk itself is social action. The way conversation analysts went about studying language as a form of social action, however, was quite innovative and introduced methods and concepts that have changed forever the way many scholars think about language. The first innovation consisted of the simple methodological requirement that one should use as objects of study recordings of “naturally occurring” conversations, that is, conversations that occurred during an occasion that had not been planned or controlled by the investigators (as would be the case in an ethnographic interview or in an experimental setting where people are asked to role play). Conversation analysts treat members’ opinions on their own behavior as just another type of data in further need of an account (this partly explains why conversation analysts usually do not rely on interviews for finding out what participants are doing with words). The method is rather a systematic analysis of what people do with language across situations.

Second, rather than starting from a number of predefined notions such as status, social relationship, role, situation, conversation analysts began by isolating what appeared as recurring types of utterances and asking questions such as “what are they doing?” This means that utterances are treated as social objects, that is, structures or moves around which people organize their interaction.

The first type of conversational exchanges Sacks became interested in were telephone calls to a Suicide Prevention Center in Los Angeles.3 From the transcripts of the tapes of these calls, Sacks started to pull out portions that displayed phenomena that caught his attention. Here are some excerpts he used in his lectures:

(1)A: Hello

B:Hello

(2)A: This is Mr Smith may I help you

B:Yes, this is Mr. Brown

3“In 1963, Garfinkel arranged for Sacks to move to Los Angeles. He was to have an appointment as Acting Assistant Professor of Sociology at UCLA, with the first year off. During that year, 1963–4, Garfinkel and Sacks were to serve as Fellows at the Center for the Scientific Study of Suicide in Los Angeles, under the sponsorship of its director, Edwin Schneidemann” (Schegloff 1992a: xv).

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Conversational exchanges

(3)A: This is Mr. Smith may I help you

B: I can’t hear you.

A:This is Mr. Smith

B:Smith

Sacks argued that the way these exchanges are organized shows an important property of verbal interaction, namely, the fact that communication is organized sequentially. This idea includes but goes beyond Saussure’s concept of syntagmatic relations (see section 6.1). Saussure was interested in the spoken chain, meant as a succession of elements that complement each other and are used to build higher-level units of meaning. Saussure and those who later developed his main ideas about linguistic structures were interested in how relations of contiguity are used at different levels of grammar. For instance, sequences of phonemes build words and sequences of words build clauses. Eventually, some linguists became interested in how clauses can build paragraphs and other larger units (see Brown and Yule 1983; Schiffrin 1994). The study of conversational exchanges introduced another aspect of sequentiality, namely, succession of speakers. What Sacks and his colleagues did was to show that such a succession was just as systematic and orderly as sequences of phonemes studied by phonologists and sequences of words studied by syntacticians. They refer to such an organization as the turn-taking system (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974). Its study developed into a central concern of conversation analysts, who became fascinated by the principles whereby participants in a conversation are able to alternate their speech in an orderly way so as to avoid simultaneous talk (“overlaps”) and silences (“gaps”). The general (much simplified) principle of conversational exchanges became known as no gaps no overlaps. How can such a system work? How can participants be so good at coordinating with one another’s actions as to know when to start and when to stop talking? One way would be to decide ahead of time on a particular order. Participants (or someone else for them) could decide that people speak according to an independently assigned rank system or, according to categories of persons, for instance, seniority or gender could be the determining factor. In other cases, political affiliation might be the relevant category. Although such systems of pre-allocation (that is, systems of turn-taking in which order is decided in advance) exist – in court, in political meetings and debates, in interviews, etc. –, in most conversations, the order of speakers and the length of each party’s contribution is negotiated during the interaction.

Starting from the empirical observation that during a conversation speakers alternate and they do so usually with no gaps or slight ones and with no overlaps or short ones, Sacks and his colleagues proposed a set of rules that account

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for such smooth transitions. Such rules have two components: (i) the turnconstructional component and (ii) the turn-allocation component.

The turn-constructional component defines the types of units a speaker can use in participating in a conversation. These units usually correspond to what linguists call utterances and range from one word – like hello in (1) above – to fully expressed sentences like I can’t hear you in (3) above, which has a Subject (I), a complex Verb (can’t hear), and an Object (you). A speaker is entitled to have a “turn” to such a unit. An important feature of a unit is that once it is started, it allows a hearer to project, that is, to make a prediction about, where it will end. The point at which it ends is called by conversation analysts transition-relevant point because it is the moment at which change of speaker may (but does not have to) take place. This component of the system not only explains how speakers manage to know when the floor is available, but also explains why overlaps occur. In some cases the next speaker overlaps because the point of possible completion, as predictable from the speaker’s talk, is, for some reason, delayed. An example is shown in (4) below, where the last word of the turn is unpredictably stretched and thus ends up overlapping with the beginning of the next speaker’s turn (see “transcription conventions” section 5.5).

(4)B: Well it wasn’t me ::

[

A: No, but you know who it was.

(Sacks et al. 1978: 17)

The turn-allocation component specifies how a next speaker is chosen. There are two techniques: (i) the current speaker selects the next speaker (this is called other-selection), and (ii) next speaker selects himself (self-selection). To account for how speaker selection takes place, conversation analysts proposed the following ordered rules:

(i)a current speaker can select the next speaker, in which case the selected party has the right and is obliged to speak next (at the transition-relevant place);

(ii)if the current speaker does not select a next speaker, once a transition-rel- evant place is reached, there are two possibilities: (a) someone else might selfselect to speak next; or (b) if no one else self-selects, then the current speaker may continue to talk (or the last speaker may resume talk).

These rules account for smooth transitions from one speaker to the next as well as for cases of simultaneous talk. Thus, in (5), the fact that both Vic and James start at the same time can be explained by rule (iia). Since Mike’s turn does not select the next speaker (rule [i]), then other speakers are allowed to self-select and they do so right after the transition-relevant point, namely, after Mike’s utterance I know who d’guy is:

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Conversational exchanges

(5)Mike: I know who d’guy is.=

This is a very powerful system that not only accounts for how conversational interactions can run smoothly, but also for how they are similar or different from other kinds of speech exchange systems, that is, interviews, debates, press conferences, classes, trials, religious ceremonies, and so on (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1978: 45). In many events that we call “formal,” for instance, the order of speakers is pre-allocated or partly pre-allocated (Atkinson and Drew 1979; Drew and Heritage 1992; Duranti 1981, 1994a; Irvine 1979). Even in such cases, however, some of the rules proposed for conversation might still work given that participants need ways of knowing when to begin and when to end their talk and might need to avoid long silences and overlaps.

Conversation analysts treat the turn taking system as a form of social organization.4 What they find interesting about studying such a system is that it can be described without relying on predetermined notions of what constitutes social structure. The concepts and rules proposed by conversation analysts are said to emerge from the data themselves, that is, from what participants actually do, from what participants themselves show that they are oriented to.

An important consequence of looking at conversations and their sequential organization was the realization that conversation is often organized in units that are larger than an individual utterance, turn, or speech act. Sacks (lecture 1, Fall 1964) noted, for instance, that certain utterances by one speaker would call for a particular type of response by another speaker. If a person says hello, the other can also say hello – in (1) above –, if a person gives his name – in (2) above –, the other also tends to provide his name in the next turn, and if a speaker said I can’t hear you – in (3) –, the other usually repeats some version of what he said earlier. To talk about such two-turn sequences, Sacks and his colleagues introduced two important concepts: the notion of adjacency pair and the notion of preference.

8.1.1Adjacency pairs

An adjacency pair is a sequence of two utterances, next (i.e. adjacent) to one another, and produced by two different speakers (Schegloff and Sacks [1973] 1984: 74). Adjacency pairs can be classified in terms of (i) the types of utterances that constitute its two parts (first pair part and second pair part), and (ii) the type

4Schegloff (1991: 46), for instance, wrote: “The work which is focused on the organization of talk-in-interaction in its own right ... is itself dealing with social organization and social structures, albeit of a different sort than in the received uses of those terms [in traditional sociology], and is no less sociological in impulse and relevance ...”.

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of pair that the two parts constitute together. Thus example (1) above – repeated below as (6) – provides an example of an adjacency pair in which both the first pair part and the second pair part are a greeting (hello), with the entire pair being a greeting exchange (see more on this later in this section).

A similar type of greeting/greeting adjacency pair is the English closing greeting

(good)bye/(good)bye and the Italian ciao/ciao, as shown from the following exchange at the end of a telephone conversation:5

(7)Ro: salutami: //le figlie.

say hi (to) (your) daughters

[

Ri: grazie. pure a voi. tutti. thanks. also to you all.

[

Ro: grazie. thanks.

→ciao.

bye.

[

→Ri: ciao.6

Not all greetings nor adjacency pairs, however, exhibit two identical words or types of utterances. In many societies, for instance, greetings are exchanged in the form of question/answer pairs. Here is an example from Kasigau, a Bantu language of southern Kenya (Milton 1982):7

5This and the following examples from Italian telephone conversations are taken from a set of audio recordings made by the author in Italy in 1987 and 1988.

6This overlap of the last greeting can be explained with the turn-taking system discussed earlier. In this case, since Ro’s grazie is a one-word turn-unit, Ri’s ciao would have occurred after an appropriate transition-relevant place, had not Ro decided to continue with her own ciao.

7For a general discussion of types of greetings and relevant bibliographical information, see Duranti (1992).

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When we look for adjacency pairs in conversations, we find a vast range of types. Here are some examples:

Question/Answer:

(9)A: What’s the name of that color?

~y

(10)A: pho: raw ch : araj? father Pro name what “What is your father’s name?”

B:na:j inta: sεŋjaj khap

The notion of adjacency pair constitutes an important innovation with respect to the notion of speech act proposed by Austin and Searle for a number of reasons. Some of the differences between speech acts and adjacency pairs stem from the fact that the latter are more complex units than a single utterance or a single speech act. Although this idea was foreshadowed in Austin’s notion of uptake and his intuition that certain types of speech acts like a bet need a response or

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acceptance in order to be felicitous (see section 7.1.1), in general, speech act theory takes individual speech acts produced by individuals as its unit of analysis.8

Both the force of an illocutionary act and the conditions for its satisfaction are typically assigned and evaluated independently of other, especially following, speech acts. But the analysis of units larger than a single utterance/speech act such as adjacency pairs provides us with important insights precisely into those aspects of language such as action that speech act theory was meant to study. If we are really interested in what speech does, it would seem crucial to look at hearers’ reactions to what is said to them. This is not done by speech act theorists.

In speech act theory, the force of an utterance must be described in terms of certain conditions that describe a context that is typically prior to or contemporary with the utterance, but not in terms of its consequences or effects. This is something that pertains to the perlocutionary act (see section 7.1.1), the most underdeveloped of the three acts introduced by Austin. Thus, in speech act theory, an assessment about someone would be judged to be a compliment, given certain pre-existing conditions.

To compliment is to express approval of the hearer for something. Complimenting presupposes that the thing the hearer is complimented for is good, though it need not necessarily be good for him. One might, for example, compliment him on his heroic and self-sacrificing behavior. (Searle and Vanderveken 1985: 215)

The conditions found in Searle and Vanderveken’s definition are important for distinguishing between compliments and other kinds of related speech acts, e.g. praising, but they frame compliments almost exclusively in terms of (i) an evaluation of the positive value of the “thing” being praised, and (ii) the pre-existing relationship between the “thing” and the hearer. The examination of compliments as parts of adjacency pairs, on the other hand, allows for a new way of examining what compliments do. As shown by Anita Pomerantz (1978), who studied compliments in conversation, compliments do not just “express approval,” they also create a “problem” for hearers, who are faced with a conflict between two general principles of interaction identified by conversation analysts, namely, the preference for agreement and the avoidance of self-praise (on the concept of “preference,” see section 8.2). To accept a compliment means to follow the general preference for agreeing with our interlocutor, but violates the dispreference for praising oneself. To reject a compliment creates the opposite situation, that is, it follows the preference for avoiding self-praise but violates the preference

8Recently, in his discussion of “collective intentionality” Searle (1990) has introduced the idea of more complex and collective types of “acts” but these are seen as special cases, distinct from such things as questions, answers, offers, etc.

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for agreement. In looking at how speakers deal with this conflict in conversation, Pomerantz identifies two strategies: praise downgrades (see examples [14] and [15] above) and referent shifts. “Referent shift” means that the recipient of the compliment responds by reassigning the praise:

This is a “solution” to the conflict between agreement and self-praise avoidance because speaker B shifts the praise without disagreeing with the positive assessment made by A. An example is provided in (24) (from Pomerantz 1978: 102):

(18)A: You’re a good rower, Honey.

B:These are very easy to row. Very light.

The method of looking at the type of responses compliments receive recognizes an important aspect of language as social action, namely, that, if we want to find out what words do, we must look beyond individual utterances, given that in spontaneous social interaction, speakers use and interpret speech acts as parts of larger sequential units. The adjacency pair is an example of such a larger sequential unit, in which one can easily see that the meaning of each of the two pair parts is constrained, explained, and amplified by the other.

Empirically, since utterances do not usually appear with tags on them clarifying what their illocutionary force (or “point”) is, the method of looking at adjacency pairs rather than isolated utterances offers a better sense of what speakers are accomplishing. Thus, in (18) above, the utterance These are very easy to row is not simply an assertion (to be judged in terms of truth values and beliefs), but a response to the utterance produced by A and a “solution” to the problem created by it. If we just say that These are very easy to row is an assertion, we still have not said anything really interesting about what that utterance is doing. Conversely, the assertion, by trying to “deal with” the “problem” created by A’s utterance, convalidates A’s utterance as a compliment and gives us a hint about what compliments do once uttered.

More generally, then, we can say that an adjacency pair provides a frame for interpretation.9 This is important not only for ethnographers as observerparticipants interested in making sense of the actions constituted by their subjects’ talk. It is also a fundamental tool that the participants themselves use for interpreting each other’s actions.

In the identification of the mechanism of the adjacency pair as a resource for social interaction, conversation analysis shares an important insight with

9 On the notion of “frame,” see Bateson (1972), Goffman (1974), Kendon (1992).

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ethnomethodology (see section 1.2.4), namely, the idea that what we need to do as analysts is first of all look at what social actors themselves do, what methods they use for solving practical everyday problems. Such problems include not only (or not necessarily) the ones explicitly recognized as problems, but also much more mundane and often unrecognized issues such as how to respond to a compliment (see above) or, more generally, the problem of letting others know that we understand what is going on and we have a particular stance with respect to it:

Adjacency pairs organization is thus an elementary framework through which conversational participants will inevitably display some analysis of one another’s action. Within this framework of reciprocal conduct, action and interpretation are inextricably intertwined. Each participant must analyze the developing course of others’ actions in order to produce appropriate reciprocal action.

(Goodwin and Heritage 1990: 288)

When speakers produce the first pair part of an adjacency pair, they create an interpretive frame within which what happens next is bound to be not only an “answer” or “second move” but also a display of how the recipient has interpreted the first pair part. Adjacency pairs are thus important mechanisms for establishing intersubjectivity, that is, mutual understanding and coordination around a common activity.10 Schegloff and Sacks (1984), for instance, have shown that both openings and closings of telephone conversations are typically done in an adjacency pair format. Why should it be so? Because by producing a second utterance, speakers can display their understanding of what the prior utterance is doing and their willingness to go along with whatever plan is implied by it (e.g. starting a conversation, closing, providing further information, changing topic) (Schegloff and Sacks 1984: 75). The adjacency pair mechanism can be very handy, especially in those cases in which a decision has to be made about continuing or terminating an interaction. In closing a conversation, participants must agree that there is nothing else to be talked about, otherwise one of the parties would feel ‘cut off’ or abruptly dismissed. For this reason, although greetings can be used to do the job of closing (one person says “good-bye” and the other person answers with another “good-bye” or some other type of closing salutation), it is important to arrive at closing salutations in a smooth and agreeable way. We cannot say “good-bye” in a conversation without preparing our conversational partners, even when we feel that everything has been said. Children’s first telephone conversations (“Hello. How are you? Fine. Goodbye.”) often sound humorous to adult listeners precisely because they violate such adult

10The theme of intersubjectivity has been explicitly approached by Schegloff (1991) in the context of a discussion of what he calls “third position repair.”

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Conversational exchanges

expectations (Garvey 1984: 35–6). Usually, we prepare our conversational partners for the possibility of a closing coming up soon. On the telephone, this is done with utterances that are taken to be possible pre-closings (Schegloff and Sacks 1984: 80). One way of doing this work is to provide an item whose only business is to show that the speaker, for now, has nothing else to say. This is done in English by such expressions as we-ell, okay, so-oo (with downward intonation contours). At this point the other speaker has the option of introducing a new topic or accepting that there is nothing more to say, hence agreeing that the conversation can come to an end. Such adjacency pairs as “okay/okay” or “alright/okay” are often found in these contexts. The following examples are from Schegloff and Sacks’s article:

(19)Dorinne: Uh-you know, it’s just like bringin theblood up. Theresa: Yeah well. THINGS UH ALWAYS WORK OUT FOR

THE BEST

[

It should be clear by now that conversation analysis not only introduces a new methodology for studying language as action, but also provides new concepts for identifying what individual utterances and words do in interaction. These new concepts constitute a new way of looking at speech as action, although they are also reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy of language. Conversation

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analysis provides a method for following Wittgenstein’s suggestion that we should look at words as always embedded in larger activities – adjacency pairs being examples of “language games.” Since the same word can appear in very different points in a conversation, we cannot speculate about what it does until we look at the larger sequence within which it occurs. For instance, the first okay by the speaker named Baldwin in (20) is different from the okay subsequently produced by the speaker named Johnson. The first okay is part of an agreement (okay fine) to a proposal and hence closes a topic. The second okay (in okay boy) is the first pair part of an adjacency pair that sets the tone for the forthcoming closing salutations.

The lack of attention to conversational sequences in Searle’s theoretical apparatus produces analyses that are often at odds with those proposed by conversation analysts. An obvious case is provided by greetings. Searle and Vanderveken (1985: 215–16) state that “[w]hen one greets someone, for example, by saying ‘Hello,’ one indicates recognition in a courteous fashion.” This description, which does not take into consideration the larger contexts in which greetings may appear, does not capture the use of hello or other kinds of greetings in telephone conversations. We know, for instance, that the first “hello” on the telephone, rather than indicating recognition, answers the summons constituted by the rings (Schegloff 1972b) and provides a resource for the caller, who can use it to “do” or “attempt” (but not “indicate” yet) recognition. Callers use the first hello to try to identify who answered the phone (Schegloff 1979a, 1986). As shown in example (21) below, it is after the first hello that the caller is in a position to display a claim to recognition. Recognition is then done through the use of a proper name (Connie in [21]):

At this point, the answerer can display that she has, in turn, recognized the caller. This is done through the reciprocal use of NAME by C in the third turn (Yeah Joanie).

When the answerer on the telephone does not reciprocate the use of name and only uses a greeting (e.g. hi), as in (23) below, callers may speculate that complete recognition has not taken place and might then proceed to self-identify, as in the last turn below (It’s Barbie) (Schegloff 1979a: 53–4).

257

(Schegloff 1979a: 53)

This last example shows that greeting by itself (hi by B in [23]) is not necessarily interpreted as evidence of recognition. Hence, even for greetings such as “hi” Searle and Vandervaken’s description is inadequate.

Sequential order is important not only within each adjacency pair but also in the relation between an adjacency pair and other (preceding or following) units. Just as hello or hi do different things depending on whether they are in the first or second part, an entire adjacency pair may have a different force depending on where it appears within a larger sequence (e.g. an entire conversation). This is the case, for instance, for the Italian greeting pair ciao/ciao, which, differently from its use in Englishand Spanish-speaking communities, can be used in Italy as either an opening or closing greeting. In (7) above, we saw an example of the pair ciao/ciao used in closing a telephone conversation. In (24), we see it used as an opening greeting at the beginning of a telephone conversation:

(24)G: pronto, hello,

S:Giorgio?

Giorgio?

→S: ciao. (opening greeting: second pair part) hi.

[...]

(from “Giorgio 3”)

In this case, consideration of the sequential aspects of the interaction provides us with a perspective on greetings and other verbal exchanges that is not immediately available within the framework of speech act theory. We can certainly acknowledge that the second ciao in example (24) is doing something, but we cannot easily agree with Searle and Vandervaken that it is doing “recognition” given that speaker S had already done recognition with the earlier turn (Giorgio?).

11As often happens during greeting exchanges, the greeting co-occurs with other linguistic material such as the ah in this example, which seems similar to the English oh used as an indication of success at recognition (see Schegloff 1979a). For more discussion of this example, see below.

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