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Beyond the adjacency pair*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2008

Amy B. M. Tsui
Amy B. M. Tsui
Affiliation:
English Language Teaching Unit, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
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Abstract

This article examines the descriptive power of the adjacency pair as a basic unit of conversational organization. It applies the notion to the analysis of conversational data and points out that there are utterances which are important contributions to the conversation and yet for which the notion fails to account. They are utterances which are not the component parts of an adjacency pair and yet form a bounded unit with it. This raises the question of which is more adequate as a basic unit of conversational organization: a three-part exchange or an adjacency pair? This article proposes that it is the former, based on the observation that the third part of an exchange is a very important element of conversational interaction, and that when it does not occur, it is often withheld for social or strategic reasons. The article argues for the nontrivial absence of the third part by showing its relevance of occurrence (Sacks 1972:342). An investigation is made of its functions by examining where, when, and why it does not occur, and where, when, and why it does occur in conversation. The discussion is exemplified by face-to-face and telephone conversation data. (Sociolinguistics, ethnomethodology, discourse analysis, pragmatics)

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 18 , Issue 4 , December 1989 , pp. 545 - 564
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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