CONVERSATION AND PREFERENCE STRUCTURE in pragmatics study

CONVERSATION AND PREFERENCE STRUCTURE

Conversation analysis

-          Floor: The right to speak

-          Turn: having control of the scarce commodity at any time

-          Local management: members of social group

-          Transition relevance place: any possible change of turn point

Pauses, Overlaps, and Backchannels

When two people attempt to have a conversation and discover that there is no ‘flow’, or smooth rhythm to their transitions, much more is being communicated than is said. If one speaker actually turns over the floor to another and the other doesn’t speak, then the silence is attributed to the second speaker and become significant is called attributive silence. There are many different ways to indicate that the listener listening, including head nods, smiles, and other facial expressions and gestures, but the most common vocal indications are called backchannel signals, or simply backchannels. In conversation, silence is significant and will be interpreted as meaningful.

Conversation Style

Some individuals expect that participation in conversation will be very active, that speaking rate will relatively fast, with almost no pausing within turns, and with some overlap or even completion of the other’s turn. This is one conversation style. It has been called a high involvement style. It differs substantially from another style in which speaker use a slower rate, expect longer pauses within turns, do not overlap, and avoid interruption or completion of the other’s turn. This non-interrupting, non imposing style has been called a high considerateness style. Instead, the more rapid-fire speaker may think the slower-paced speaker just doesn’t have much to say, is shy, and perhaps boring or even stupid. In return, he or she is likely to be viewed as noisy, pushy, domineering, selfish, and even tiresome. Features on conversational style will often be interpreted as personality traits.

Adjacency Pairs

Despite differences in style, most speakers seem to find a way to cope with everyday business of social interaction. For example: Hello with Hi, How are you with fine, etc. the automatic sequences are called adjacency pairs. They always consist of a first part and a second part, produced by different speakers.

Not all first parts immediately received their second parts, however. It often happens that a question-answer sequence will be delayed while another question-answer sequence intervenes. The sequence will then take the form of Q1-Q2-A2-A1, with the middle pair (Q2-A2) being called insertion sequence. For example:                 A: do you want the early flight?

                                B: what time does it arrive?

                                A: Nine forty-five

                                B: Yeah, That’s great

Delay in response symbolically marks potential unavailability of the immediate expected answer. Delay represents distance between what is expected and what is provided.

Preference Structure

Basically, a first part that contains a request or an offer is typically made in the expectation that the second part will be an acceptance. An acceptance is structurally likelihood is called preference. The term is used to indicate a socially determined structural pattern and doesn’t refer to any individual’s mental or emotional desires. Preference structure divides second parts into preferred and dispreferred social acts. The preferred is the structurally expected next act and the dispreferred is the structurally unexpected next act. We might say that in adjacency pair, silence the second part is always an indication of a dispreferresd response. Indeed, silence often leads the first speaker to revise the first part in order to get the second part that is not silence from the other speaker. It must follow, then, that the conversations between those who are close familiars will tend to have fewer elaborate dispreferreds than conversations between those who are still working out their social relationship.