6.3 Some Features Of Talk
The study of conversation as interaction gave rise to the discovery of certain
systematic features of conversational organisation. Many of these discoveries
were the work of such pioneers as Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson, working
both individually and collectively, and involved such conversational features
as turn-taking, adjacency pairs, pre-sequences, side sequences, insertion
sequences, opening and closing routines, as well as routines for repair and
preference. Here we will look at three major organisational features –
turn-taking, adjacency pairs (which necessarily includes insertion sequences),
and preference. Though superficially such features may seem to be merely the
mechanisms of conversation, the nuts and bolts of talk, if you will, it is
worth underlining that they are the social manifestation of the means whereby
we all interactively construct meaning. As Heritage and Atkinson put it, ‘the
sequential next-positioned linkage between any two actions is a critical resource
by which a first speaker can determine the sense that a second made of his
or her utterance’ (1984:8). It is through such organisation that ‘a
context of publicly-displayed and continuously updated intersubjective understandings
is systematically sustained’ (p.11). For Levinson, the methods which
use such tools of analysis are important because they 'offer us a way of avoiding
the indefinitely extendable and unverifiable categorisation and speculation
about actors’ intents so typical of DA[discourse analysis]-style analysis’
(1983:319). This is an important point which has already arisen – to
what degree can analysts impose themselves on the data – and one which
we shall have occasion to return to.
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