The concept of “preference” has developed in conversation analytic research to characterize conversational events in which alternative, but nonequivalent, courses of action are available to the participants (Sacks 1973c). Such alternatives may arise at the level of lexical selection, utterance design, and action or sequence choice – to name only the most prominent areas of investigation in this field. The term “preference” refers to a range of phenomena associated with the fact that choices among nonequivalent courses of action are routinely implemented in ways that reflect an institutionalized ranking of alternatives. Despite its connotations, the term is not intended to reference personal, subjective, or “psychological” desires or dispositions.

That selections among activities are shaped by institutionalized rankings is evidenced in a range of ways. First, there is the primary distributional evidence that, in situations of choice, particular actions are avoided, withheld, or delayed across large numbers of occasions involving a variety of speakers in a range of contexts.

Second, across a similarly varied range of occasions, preferred/dispreferred alternatives are routinely performed in distinctive ways. Preferred activities are normally performed directly and with little delay. Dispreferred activities, by contrast, are usually performed with delay between turns, are commonly delayed within turns, and are variously softened and made indirect. The evidence here is of double significance.