Preamble

The title of this book is Conversation Analysis: Comparative Perspectives, a title which appears to offer a well-defined promissory note about the nature of its contents. And so it does. There is an introduction which sets out some central characteristics of conversation-analytic (CA) work, and briefly reviews the history of comparative analysis in anthropology – together with some of the problems confronted in the course of that history. A number of the substantive chapters that follow report work that is comparative in its very nature; most of the authors of chapters in which this is not the case go out of their way to set their respective topics in comparative context – either by including data from other language/culture settings or by reviewing (some of) the literature which sets their work in a comparative framework. For a readership that is (I suspect) largely drawn from the so-called “social” or “human” sciences – anthropology, linguistics and applied linguistics, communication, psycholinguistics and cognitive science, social psychology, and sociology, this is what one would expect such a volume to provide … from its sub-title.

But its main title should make relevant as well other dimensions of comparison than the linguistic and cultural ones, and, before settling down to address what is actually in this book, I would like to use my bully pulpit to call to mind other “comparative perspectives” that ought to figure importantly in CA work, or at least be taken into account, even when they do not figure centrally. Like what?

Introduction

Of all the practices for referring to persons in talk-in-interaction, the most common and the most straightforward – at least for English – appears to be self-reference. For English, with very few exceptions (Schegloff 1996a: 443–45), a speaker refers to self with the dedicated term ‘I’ (and its grammatical variants – me, my, mine, etc.). This term is opaque with respect to all the usual key categorical dimensions – age, gender, status and the like, and is also insensitive to the history of prior reference – whether for the first or the nth occasion in some conversation or across multiple conversations, self is referred to as ‘I’.

In this chapter, I exploit one locus of self-reference that is different from the aforementioned routine – saying or otherwise conveying who you are either to a question inquiring about it (‘who are you?’, ‘who is this?’, etc.) or a sequential juncture that makes addressing this undertaking relevant. This locus is the opening section of American telephone calls before the advent of cell-phones and automatic caller-identification.

The forms of self-identification or self-presentation at this interactional juncture are constrained by the same combination of conversational preferences examined elsewhere in the conversation-analytic literature on person-reference (Sacks 1972a, 1972b, 1992; Sacks and Schegloff 1979, this volume; Schegloff 1996a) – recipient design and minimization.

Introduction

Research into the social organization of conversation has, as one type of product, the isolation of a ‘preference’ operating for some domain(s) of conversation and the depiction of the organizational machinery through which that preference is effected. A variety of such preferences and their organizational instruments have been studied. It regularly turns out that several of them are concurrently relevant, concurrently applicable and concurrently satisfied.

However, on some occasions in which some such two preferences appear to figure, the actually produced talk does not concurrently satisfy them. Examination of such materials is particularly useful. They can, for example, give support to the proposal that separate preferences are involved, a possibility that the regularity of their concurrent satisfaction obscures. Furthermore, examination of such materials permits the extraction of a ‘second-order’ organization directed to an integration of preferences on occasions when their potential concurrent satisfiability is not realized.

The study of various such second-order devices suggests that they do provide resources that organize adjustment of the concurrently applicable preferences when both are not satisfiable. What is more interesting is that the second-order devices themselves represent types of solutions, a common one being to prefer satisfaction of one of the applicable preferences, and the other being relaxed to such a point as will allow the preferred to be achieved: The non-preferred of the two is not suspended but ‘relaxed step by step’.

The organization of sequences is one of the central forms of organization that gives shape and coherence to stretches of talk and the series of turns of which stretches of talk are composed. The focus of this organization is not, in general, convergence on some topic being talked about, but the contingent development of courses of action. The coherence which is involved is that which relates the action or actions which get enacted in or by an utterance to the ones which have preceded and the ones which may follow. The very root of the word “interaction” underscores the centrality of action to the commerce between people dealing with each other, and this aspect of their conduct is a central preoccupation informing what people do in the turns in which they speak, and informing as well what they are heard to be doing.

We have focused on what is very likely the basic unit of sequence organization – the adjacency pair. There are other types of sequence in conversation, but a very broad range of the sequences we find organized as systematic expansions of adjacency pairs. And at least some sequences which may not be based on adjacency pairs nonetheless have some of their parts constituted by these sequence-constructional units.

We started by considering the basic, minimal form of the adjacency pair and its constitutive features – two turns, by different speakers, adjacently positioned, one recognizably a first pair part (FPP, or F), the other recognizably a second pair part (SPP, or S), with the two drawn from the same pair (or sequence) type.

Past and future

A primer, we are told by the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (Onions, 1980:1,670), is “a small introductory book on any subject.” Some ten years ago, amidst a mixture of encouragement and pestering by colleagues, I set about writing a primer in conversation analysis. I had been teaching a two-term course called “Conversational Structures” to classes of both undergraduate and graduate students for over twenty years by then, and more abbreviated courses to one or the other of these cohorts for several years before that. I had a fairly secure sense of what needed doing and how to get it done. Surely that could be transferred from the lecture hall and discussion room to the pages of a book.

The first term of my course took up three main subjects. First, we discussed what was meant by the term “conversation” in ordinary, informal talk, and what we would mean by it for the purposes of inquiry, and what, furthermore, might be meant by “structures of conversation.” This ordinarily pro forma “introduction to the course” grew over time to three seventy-five-minute lectures, and sometimes part of a fourth. Second, we undertook a rough introduction to turn-taking in conversation – how people get to talk and for how long and with what consequences. For all its roughness, participants found themselves grappling with details of everyday conduct they had never before registered as “things” at all, let alone with the kind of care that was asked of them; let alone the consequentiality they were invited to see in them; let alone doing this for three to four weeks.

The first place at which a two-part unit can be expanded is before its first part – hence the term “pre-expansion.” But that immediately confronts us with a question. How can we analyze and understand something like an utterance by reference to something else which has not yet occurred (and, indeed, which may end up never occurring, as we shall shortly see)? What justification might there be for such a procedure if we mean our analysis to be empirically grounded? The answer is that we proceed in that way because that is how the parties to conversation seem to use these exchanges in producing them and in understanding them. The parties to pre-expansion exchanges display an orientation in them to a base adjacency pair which may subsequently develop.

Note that we have already referred to “exchanges” in referring to pre-expansion. Virtually all pre-expansions are themselves constructed of adjacency pairs, and we will therefore regularly refer to them as “pre-sequences” (Sacks, 1992a:685–92 et passim). Both senses of this ambiguous term are relevant and important. They are themselves sequences, and they come before sequences – they are recognizably “pre-,” that is, preliminary to something else. Often the “something else” they are preliminary to is quite specific: it is a first pair part of a particular pair type – an invitation, an offer, a request, an announcement. Preliminaries that project such specific imminent FPPs we will call type-specific pre-sequences– for example, pre-invitations, pre-offers, pre-requests, pre-announcements.

When a sequence is brought to a close, whether by its second pair part, by a sequence-closing third, after a more-than-minimal post-expansion, or with a sequence-closing sequence, some new sequence is ordinarily launched, either “next” or after a lapse of some length, whether of silence or of intervening activity. In introducing our discussion of sequence organization we noted that successive turns have a shape to them, relations of mutual relevance and positioning, coherence and orderliness that makes of them not merely a series, but a sequence of turns. Although successive sequences may often be less closely linked than successive turns are, there can be particular ties of relevance between several sequences that serve to extend our sense of the coherence and organizational relatedness of a stretch of talk beyond the boundaries of a single base sequence and its expansions which have so far been sketched. Here we will examine just a few of these types of organization of more than one sequence, or sequences of sequences.

Reciprocal or exchange sequences

By reciprocal or exchange sequences we refer to episodes in which a sequence which has just been initiated by A to B (that is, in which A is the first pair part speaker and B is the second pair part speaker) is then (after it has run its course) reciprocated – initiated by B to A. Same sequence type; reversed speaker/recipient participation.

In some respects, then, this sequence of sequences is akin to “counters.”

One upshot of our discussion of the organization of preference and dispreference was that the production of a sequence whose first and second pair parts are in a preferred relationship to each other is something which both parties – an F speaker and an S speaker – can be oriented to and can take measures to achieve (although they do not always achieve it). We noted, for example, that first pair part speakers can re-do a question to reverse its displayed preference so that the response which seems to be “in the cards” can be done by its speaker as an agreeing or preferred response rather than a dispreferred one, and that the practice of deferring dispreferred responses can provide the opportunity for just such a redesign of the first pair part. In this light, we could understand pre-expansions as resources which a prospective F-speaker can initiate to implement an orientation to the possibility of a dispreferred response, and whose outcome can ground moves to proceed to the first pair part or not, and what type of first pair part and how constructed. Like pre-expansions, many insert expansions are oriented to issues of preference and dispreference, but that is not their universal preoccupation.

With insert expansions, we come to a type of expansion which prospective S-speakers can initiate. Insert expansions, like pre-expansions, are themselves constructed out of adjacency pairs and take the form of insert sequences.

Although the account of sequence structure built on the underlying resource of the adjacency pair has considerable scope and robustness, it should not be understood as an inflexible template which mechanically generates “parts” assigned to various participants. Rather it should be understood as an organizational resource – a kind of convergently oriented-to set of possible routes – which the participants draw on in charting and incrementally building a joint course of action.

There is, then, an underlying range of orderly structures and a set of practices for suiting those structures to the particulars of the moment in which the participants are acting. Because sequences are a major resource in implementing courses of action, we should expect their forms and trajectories to reflect (among other sources of variation) the contingencies of the courses of action being pursued through them. And because particular settings may be the site of distinctive activities and courses of action, variants of the sequence organization and practices we have been describing may show up with special clarity in “specialized settings,” whether specialized by virtue of the work which gets done in them (which will be our focus here) or by reference to other characteristics (e.g., the population which they specially mobilize and their interaction-relevant characteristics, the non-work activities specially pursued there, etc.).

This is not a vapid and shapeless “adaptation to context,” not an undisciplined “anything will do,” or “anything goes.”