Tsui1989

Tsui1989
BibType	ARTICLE
Key	Tsui1989
Author(s)	Amy B. M. Tsui
Title	Beyond the Adjacency Pair
Editor(s)
Tag(s)	EMCA, Sociolinguistics, ethnomethodology, discourse analysis, pragmatics, three-part sequences, Adjacency Pairs
Publisher
Year	1989
Language
City
Month
Journal	Language in Society
Volume	18
Number	4
Pages	545-564
URL
DOI
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title
Chapter

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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 com-
ponent 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 con-
versational 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 conversa-
tional interaction, and that when it does not occur, it is often withheld
for social or strategic reasons. The article argues for the nontrivial ab-
sence of the third part by showing its relevance of occurrence (Sacks
I972:342). An investigation is made of its functions by examining where,
when, and why it does not occur, and where, when, and why it does oc-
cur in conversation. The discussion is exemplified by face-to-face and
telephone conversation data.

Notes