Text 17

harvey sacks: Lectures on Conversation. Volume i. Blackwell 1992, pages 3-4

I'll start off by giving some quotations.

1. A: Hello. B: Hello.

2. A: This is Mr Smith may I help you. B: Yes, this is Mr Brown.

108 READINGS

READINGS 109

(3) A: This is Mr Smith may I help you. B: I can't hear you. A: This is Mr Smith. B: Smith.

These are some first exchanges in telephone conversations col­lected at an emergency psychiatric hospital. They are occurring between persons who haven't talked to each other before. One of them, A, is a staff member of this psychiatric hospital. B can be either somebody calling about themselves, that is to say in trouble in one way or another, or somebody calling about somebody else.

I have a large collection of these conversations, and I got started looking at these first exchanges as follows. A series of persons who called this place would not give their names. The hospital's concern was, can anything be done about it? One question I wanted to address was, where in the course of the conversation could you tell that somebody would not give their name? So I began to look at the materials. It was in fact on the basis of that question that I began to try to deal in detail with conversations.

I found something that struck me as fairly interesting quite early. And that was that if the staff member used 'This is Mr Smith may I help you' as their opening line, then overwhelmingly, any answer other than 'Yes, this is Mr Brown' (for example, 'I can't hear you,' 'I don't know,' 'How do you spell your name?') meant that you would have serious trouble getting the caller's name, if you got the name at all....

Looking at the first exchange compared to the second, we can be struck by two things. First of all, there seems to be a fit between what the first person who speaks uses as their greeting, and what the person who is given that greeting returns. So that if A says, 'Hello,' then B tends to say 'Hello.' If A says 'This is Mr Smith may I help you,' B tends to say 'Yes, this is Mr Brown.' We can say there's a procedural rule there, that a person who speaks first in a telephone conversation can choose their form of address, and in choosing their form of address they can thereby choose the form of address the other uses.

I> Do you think that the 'procedural rule' presented here applies to all 'first exchanges' in telephone conversations?

t> Can you describe this 'procedural rule' in terms of preference

structure (as outlined in Chapter 8, pages -78-82) by including example (3) in your analysis?

[> What advantages and disadvantages do you think there are in using telephone data as the basis for analyzing how conversa­tion works?

Text 18

h. sacks, e.schegloff, and g.jefferson: 'A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking in conversa­tion' in Language 50,1974, pages 700-1

To merit serious consideration, it seems to us, a model should be capable of accommodating (i.e., either be compatible with, or allow the derivation of) the following grossly apparent facts. In any conversation, we observe the following:

1. Speaker-change recurs, or at least occurs.

2. Overwhelmingly, one party talks at a time.

1. Occurrences of more than one speaker at a time are com­ mon, but brief.

2. Transitions (from one turn to a next) with no gap and no overlap are common. Together with transitions charac­ terized by slight gap or slight overlap, they make up the vast majority of transitions.

3. Turn order is not fixed, but varies.

4. Turn size is not fixed, but varies.

5. Length of conversation is not specified in advance.

6. What parties say is not specified in advance.

(9) Relative distribution of turns is not specified in advance. (10) Number of parties can vary.

(n) Talk can be continuous or discontinous.

12. Turn-allocation techniques are obviously used. A current speaker may select a next speaker (as when he addresses a question to another party); or parties may self-select in starting to talk.

13. Various 'turn-constructional units' are employed; e.g., turns can be projectedly 'one word long', or they can be sentential in length.

14. Repair mechanisms exist for dealing with turn-taking errors and violations; e.g., if two parties find themselves

IIO READINGS

READINGS

III

talking at the same time, one of them will stop prema­turely, thus repairing the trouble.

I> Can you divide these fourteen statements into two groups— one that applies to all conversations and one that applies to only some conversations in some contexts? What kinds of situations or people appear to create exceptions?

[> Should these statements be restricted to any conversation that is middle-class American and basically friendly? Can you think of different factors such as social class, culture, ethnic­ity, relationship, age—or any others that will have an effect on how turn-taking proceeds?