8.2 The notion of preference

Schegloff, Jefferson, and Sacks found that repairs are organized in predictable, that is, common, recurrent ways. Thus, when another party initiates the repair – as in (27) and (28) above –, he or she does so in the next turn. This means that participants other than the current speaker withhold repair initiations until the next transition-relevant place (see above). In fact, usually other-initiated repairs are delayed a bit after the turn in which they occur, suggesting that the speaker is providing some extra time for the person who produced the “trouble” to correct on his or her own – this is the case in (28) and (29). In some cases, the other party might wait so long that no repair occurs at all. This organization is connected to a preference in conversation to let speakers fix their own “troubles.” In other words, English conversational data suggests that there is a preference for self-repair and a dispreference for other-repair. Further evidence of this preference is shown by the tendency to modulate or downgrade othercorrections, e.g. by the addition of hedges or uncertainty markers, e.g. the use of

I think in (29) or the common use of the form you mean X? or the framing of the correction as a joke.

8.2.2The avoidance of psychological explanation

One of the features of conversation analysis is that it examines such phenomena as repairs without entering the issue of the individual motivations for such behaviors. Researchers simply look at what speakers do. From such observations, they inductively arrive at the organization of public behavior. This means that the notion of preference is not individually but collectively defined. It represents a type of organization, a set of rules or tendencies that anyone who participates in conversational interaction must reckon with. The meaning of a speaker’s actions is given by the expectations routinely associated with a particular type of exchange. Speakers have choices, but those choices are constrained by the system within which they must operate in order to be members of a society.

The view of language as a public phenomenon and the need to understand individual moves as part of larger social institutions is reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy (see section 7.2.1). This perspective is difficult for many students in western academic environments to grasp because people in the west commonly explain behavior in terms of individual motivations. Sacks was quite aware of this problem, as shown by these concluding remarks in his opening lecture in the Fall of 1964:

One final note. When people start to analyze social phenomena, if it looks like things occur with the sort of immediacy we find in some of these exchanges, then, if you have to make an elaborate analysis of it [i.e. the way Sacks does it] ... then you figure that they couldn’t

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