Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Conversation Analysis 501
contribution. We can see this very clearly in an example such as the
following:
(6) Parky (Cited in Sacks et al., 1974)
01 Tourist: Has the park cha:nged much,
02 Parky: Oh:: ye:s,
03 (1.0)
04 Old man: Th’Funfair changed it’n [ahful lot [didn’it.
05 Parky: → [Th- [That-
06 Parky: → That changed it,
In this example, at lines 05–06, Parky begins an incipient next turn at
the fi rst point of possible completion in Old Man’s turn. Parky starts up
here and again at the next point of possible completion not by virtue of
any silence (by the time he starts there is no hearable silence) but by virtue
of the projected possible completion of the TCU, which constitutes a
potential transition relevance place. Evidence such as this leads to the conclusion
that ‘transfer of speakership is coordinated by reference to such
transition relevance places’ (Sacks et al., 1974: 703).
Returning to the fragment from the conversation between Deb and
Dick, notice that the transitions between speakers are managed in such a
way as to minimize both gap and overlap. We now have a partial account
of how participants are able to achieve this. Co-participants monitor the
syntactic, prosodic and broadly speaking pragmatic features of the current
turn to fi nd that it is about to begin, now beginning, continuing, now
coming to completion – they anticipate, that is, points at which it is possibly
complete. A point of possible unit completion is a place for possible
speaker transition – what Sacks et al. (1974) defi ne as a ‘transition relevance
place’. There is of course much more that could relevantly be said
about this fragment along these lines but since this is merely meant to
introduce different ‘organizations of practice’ that go into a single fragment
we now move on to consider the organization of talk into sequences.
Before we are done I will return to consider issues of turn-taking briefl y.
It is obvious enough that in conversation, actions often come in pairs
and that a fi rst action such as a complaint, a request or an invitation makes
relevant a next, responsive action (or a delimited range of actions). If that
action is not produced, it can be found, by the participants, to be missing
where any number of things did not happen but are nevertheless not missing
in the same sense. Schegloff (1968) described this relationship between
a fi rst and second action as one of ‘conditional relevance’ and the unit
itself as an ‘adjacency pair’ (see Schegloff & Sacks, 1973).
What kind of organization is the adjacency pair? It is not a statistical
probability and clearly not a categorical imperative. Rather, the organization
described is a norm to which conversationalists hold one another