Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

490 Chapter 17
enced the pain of never getting back to a story from which we were sidetracked
in a conversation. When that happens, we might think badly of the
person who did it, or we might shrug it off—depending on the context and
what’s at stake. If you’re in a job interview and the interviewer sidetracks you,
you’d probably think twice about insisting that the interviewer let you finish
the story you were telling.
Adjacency Pairs
Among the first things that conversation analysts noticed when they started
looking carefully at conversations was ordered pairs of expressions, like questions
and greetings (Schegloff and Sacks 1973). Once the first part of a pair
occurs, the second part is expected.
Sacks (1992:3ff) noticed that workers at a psychiatric hospital’s emergency
telephone line greeted callers by saying something like, ‘‘Hello. This is Mr.
Smith. May I help you?’’ Most of the time, the response was ‘‘Hello, this is
Mr. Brown,’’ but on one occasion, the caller responded, ‘‘I can’t hear you.’’
When the worker repeated his greeting, ‘‘This is Mr. Smith,’’ with an emphasis
on Smith, the caller responded ‘‘Smith.’’ In this case, the rule for an adjacency
pair was not really being broken. It was being negotiated by both parties, on
the fly, during the conversation. Mr. Smith, the suicide prevention worker, was
trying to get the caller to give his name, and the caller was trying not to give
his name.
If conversations are dynamic things, with constant negotiation, then, to
understand the rules of conversations, you can’t interview people about the
rules of, say, greetings. You have to study real conversations in which greetings
occur.
Here is an example of an adjacency pair—a question-answer pair—that’s
broken up between its parts.
1. A: Is it good? The Szechuan pork?
2. B: Y’like spicy, uh–
3. A: [Yeah
4. B: It’s kinda, y’know, hot.
5. A: Great
6. B: Yeah, me too.
There is a lot going on here. A asks B if a particular dish is good. This is
the first part of a question pair, which calls for an answer. B responds with
another question, which creates a new expectation for an answer. A anticipates
this and answers ‘‘yeah’’ (line 3) before B finishes her thought (which presumably
was ‘‘y’like spicy, uh, food?’’).