Adjacency pair
| Encyclopedia of Terminology for CA and IL: Adjacency pair | |
|---|---|
| Author(s): | Tiina Eilittä (University of Oulu, Finland) (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1655-7535) & Anna Vatanen (University of Helsinki, Finland) (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8236-657X) |
| To cite: | Eilittä, Tiina & Vatanen, Anna. (2025). Adjacency pair. In Alexandra Gubina, Elliott M. Hoey & Chase Wesley Raymond (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Terminology for Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics. International Society for Conversation Analysis (ISCA). DOI: [ ] |
A basic unit in the organization of social interaction and social action is a sequence (e.g., Schegloff, 1968, 2007). Sequences minimally consist of two turns. When the link between the two turns is particularly tight and conventionalized, the sequence is formed of an adjacency pair. An adjacency pair is thus a sequence that is composed of two turns, called first pair part and second pair part, that are performed sequentially, one after another, by two separate speakers (Schegloff & Sacks, 1973). Examples of adjacency pairs include greeting sequences (hi – hello), offering sequences (as seen in Excerpt 1), and information-request sequences (as in Excerpt 2).
(1) (Schegloff, 2007: 51) 07 Don: Dju wa[nt a knife? 08 Bet: [Oh yea:h.= 09 Ann: =[Nyeh,
(2) (Hakulinen, 2001: 3) [telephone conversation]
01 E: On-ks toi äiti kotona.
is-Q that mother home-at
Is your mummy there.
02 S: O:n
is
Yes
At the core of adjacency pairs is the idea of conditional relevance, which refers to how certain types of initiating turns make relevant a restricted range of possible next actions (Schegloff & Sacks, 1973; Schegloff, 2007). In other words, a speaker’s first pair part (e.g., an information-seeking question) makes a particular type-fitted second pair part (e.g., an answer) conditionally relevant and expected from the recipient (Sacks, 1995; Schegloff, 1968). If the relevant second pair part to a first pair part is not produced, co-participants may treat it as missing and hold the person who should have produced it as accountable (Davidson, 1984; Heritage, 1984; Pomerantz, 1984; Schegloff, 1968, 2007). This becomes visible, for example, when the speaker pursues a response from the recipient by repeating the initial first pair part (e.g., Eilittä & Vatanen, 2023) or modifying it (Davidson, 1984). Excerpt 3 shows how a child (Iiro, IIR) repeats the first pair part (a summons; lines 26, 29 and 31) and complements the verbal summonses by touching his dad’s (DAD) neck in order to pursue a response from him. His dad produces the second pair part (an answer) to the summonses in line 32 (line 28 is an end of a telling by Niklas, dad’s friend).
(3) Eilittä, 2024a: 113)
26 IIR: ISKÄ.
daddy
27 (0.4)
28 NIK: hyvä ava°in° [°°(itelle.)°°
a good key (for oneself)
29 IIR: [>isi,<
daddy
30 (0.3)%(0.5)%(0.3) ((=1.1))
iir %.....%touching dad’s neck-->>
31 IIR: i:si::,
daddy
32 DAD: mitä.
what
For some adjacency pairs, there is only one type-fitted response (e.g., a greeting to a greeting). For other adjacency pairs, however, there may be several alternative second pair parts from which the recipient of the first pair part needs to choose. For example, when the first pair part is an invitation, its recipient may either accept or decline it in the second pair part (e.g., Margutti et al. 2018). Similarly, a request may be either granted or rejected in the second pair part (e.g., Drew & Couper-Kuhlen 2014; for other turn types that a recipient of a request may use, see, e.g., Vatanen & Haddington 2023, 2024). Typically, one of the two alternatives is the preferred one (e.g., acceptance or granting) while the other is the dispreferred one (e.g., declining or rejection) (see preference).
However, at times, speakers may respond to first pair parts with other actions, such as requests for clarification and counters (Levinson, 2013; Schegloff, 2007). These types of second turns are not, strictly speaking, the normatively expected second pair parts of the adjacency pair in question, and hence the two consecutive turns do not form an adjacency pair.
While first pair parts often make certain type-fitted responses strongly expected and relevant, not all initiating actions mobilise a response to the same degree. It has been shown that certain types of first pair parts, such as noticings and announcements, make a response less strongly expected (Stivers & Rossano, 2010). A silence (a gap) after these types of actions is thus less problematic, such as in the following exchange from a situation where a group of people is shoveling dung in a sheep stable when Toomas makes a comment, shown on line 04 below, and no-one responds (Keevallik 2018).
(4) (Keevallik 2018: 320, slightly modified)
03 (3.0)
04 Toomas: Kurat see on nagu põhjatu sin. hh
Damned it’s like bottomless here.
05 (0.5)*(27.0)*(9.3)
*Veiko and Piia possibly looking at Toomas.
*Renee grabs wheelbarrow handles to pull it out.
06 Piia: aa,
The adjacency pair structure thus has a fundamental significance for speakers as well as for the study of conversations: first pair parts and the responses they receive display how mutual understanding and intersubjectivity are established in talk (Heritage, 1984; Schegloff, 1992). To analysts, participants’ responses to first pair parts provide evidence for how preceding talk has been understood by the participants. This analytic resource of Conversation Analysis is referred to as the next turn proof procedure (e.g., Sacks et al., 1974: 729).
In their minimal form, adjacency pairs involve two turns: a first pair part and a second pair part (Schegloff, 2007). Even though it is possible for sequences to be composed of minimal adjacency pairs only, especially when opening and closing parts of conversations (e.g., Schegloff, 2007: 22), sequences are often more complex than that. Complexity is brought to adjacency pairs with expansions. Adjacency pairs can be expanded in several ways. Pre-expansions precede the first pair parts and thus the base pair (Schegloff, 2007: 27), that is, the underlying adjacency pair. Insert expansions occur between first and second pair parts, and post-expansions follow second pair parts (Levinson, 1983; Schegloff, 1988, 2007; Sidnell, 2010; Stivers, 2013).
Adjacency pairs may be produced solely with talk, but they can also be accomplished multimodally. Similar to verbal adjacency pairs, in these situations, the first pair part makes another action sequentially expected and conditionally relevant. Adjacency pairs are multimodal when the first and second pair parts are delivered in different modalities, for example, when the FPP is produced verbally (e.g., a request) and the SPP in a bodily manner (e.g., performing the requested action), as shown in Excerpt 5 (Rauniomaa & Keisanen, 2012; Keisanen & Rauniomaa, 2012; Stukenbrock, 2014, 2018; see also Mondada, 2014).
(5) (Keisanen & Rauniomaa, 2012: 327, simplified)
15 JEANNINE: Alex can you *pass me the pepper.
alex *initiates visual search
16 JONATHAN: *Laura can you say grace please
alex *grabs pepper and places it in front of Jeannine
At times, adjacency pairs can be performed as embodied actions without any accompanying talk. This can be seen, for example, in greetings, when participants wave at each other without producing verbal greetings (e.g., Siitonen et al., 2022). An example of this follows in Excerpt 6, where Noora and Linnea greet each other by waving. Noora and other participants have been in a Zoom space where Linnea joins. Linnea joining the space prompts Noora to smile and wave at Linnea, to which Linnea responds with a wave.
(6) (Siitonen et al., 2022: 96, simplified) 05 SAIJA: .hhh +heh during the day, noora -> +waves 06 SAIJA: .hh*hhh [so ] it’s all quite, 07 SYLVIA: [°mm°] linnea -> *waves
With respect to timing, in many cases the SPP follows the FPP in a consecutive manner. However, second pair parts can be – and often are – produced in overlap with the first pair parts (e.g., Vatanen 2014, 2018; Deppermann et al. 2021), and the early timing has been shown to carry specific meanings related, e.g., to an agreeing second speaker’s equal, independent commitment to the assertion made by a first speaker (Vatanen 2018). This issue of timing of SPPs becomes even less straightforward when one or both of the pair parts are embodied. Embodied SPPs are frequently produced already when the verbal first pair part is under way (see Deppermann et al. 2021 for an overview; and De Stefani 2021 on question-answer sequences where the answer is a head nod). For example, in a study of request sequences in specific contexts, Mondada (2021) shows how the local ecology (e.g., gesture, gaze, and bodily orientations) and the praxeological context (features of the local ongoing activity) enable the participants to anticipate and produce the next relevant action very early on – sometimes even before it has been requested. Consequently, some of these cases actually question the ‘firstness’ and ‘secondness’ of actions in certain contexts. Mondada (2021: 415) also points out that “the sequential value of an action crucially depends on the temporality in which it is achieved”.
Adjacency pairs have been researched in various populations of interactional participants. Research has demonstrated, for example, how children summon adults, and how the adults respond to the children’s summonses (e.g., Eilittä, 2024a; Cekaite, 2009; Filipi, 2009). In contrast, Suàrez (2017) has studied how people with dementia react to information-seeking questions, and shown how they produce less and less relevant answers to questions as their disease progresses. Adjacency pairs have also been studied between non-human participants. For example, Rossano (2013, 2024) has illustrated how the communicative actions of bonobo monkeys can be organized in adjacency pairs. Similarly, it has been demonstrated how types of adjacency pairs can also occur in conversations that humans have, for example, with robots (e.g., Tisserand & Baldauf-Quilliatre, 2024) and virtual assistants (Reineke & Helmer, 2024).
The majority of research on adjacency pairs, cited above, has focused on casual face-to-face or telephone conversations. However, adjacency pairs have also been studied in different face-to-face contexts, for example, in institutional interactions in courtrooms (e.g., Drew & de Almeida, 2020), classrooms (e.g., Korpela, Kurhila & Stevanovic, 2022), kindergartens (Eilittä, 2024b), and medical encounters (e.g., Heritage, 2009). As different technologies and conversational platforms have developed, research on adjacency pairs in technology-mediated interactions has also emerged. Research on online interactions has shown how, in text-based asynchronous or quasi-synchronous interactions, the first and second pair parts of adjacency pairs are not always adjacent (e.g., Garcia & Jacobs, 1999; König, 2019; Meredith, 2019). Adjacency pairs have also been studied in video- and audio-mediated meetings, for example, regarding openings of the meetings (e.g., Oittinen & Piirainen-Marsh, 2015), as well as in video calls between family members where adults are facilitating young children to respond to first pair parts directed at them (e.g., Gan, Greiffenhagen & Kendrick, 2023).
Finally, studies have shown that the adjacency pair structure is relevant for all human communities – at least all that have been studied in this respect. For example, the timing of second pair parts to first pair parts that ask a polar question has been shown to be strikingly similar across languages and cultures (Stivers et al. 2009). In Sidnell’s (2001: 1263) words, there is thus evidence that “the orderliness of conversation (and of talk-in-interaction generally) is grounded in a species-specific adaptation to the contingencies of human social intercourse.” Nevertheless, each language has its own ways of building up the social actions in an adjacency pair (for examples, see entries on specific social actions).
Additional Related Entries:
- Conditional relevance
- First pair part
- Insert expansion
- Next-turn proof procedure
- Pre-expansion
- Post-expansion
- Second pair part
- Sequence
- Social action
- Turn-constructional unit (TCU)
- Turn-taking
Cited References:
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