Pre-pre
| Encyclopedia of Terminology for CA and IL: Pre-pre | |
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| Author(s): | Nathalie Bauer (Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany) (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8501-8079) |
| To cite: | Bauer, Nathalie. (2023). Pre-pre. 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: |
Pre-pre's (short for preliminaries to preliminaries) are a practice with which speakers project an action that is not to follow immediately but will be preceded by further preliminaries first (Schegloff 1980: 116, 1990: 61, 2007: 44). Thus, pre-pre’s “serve to exempt what directly follows them from being treated as ‘produced in its own right.’ They make room for, and mark, what follows them as ‘preliminary.’” (Schegloff 1980: 116) They are referred to as “pre-pre’s” since they “are not only a preliminary to the announced-to-come action”, but also a preliminary to further preliminaries (Schegloff 2006: 150). The turn design of pre-pre’s usually provides criteria for recognizing the projected main action (Schegloff 2007: 44), as the following extract from Liddicoat (2007: 139) illustrates:
(Liddicoat 2007: 140]
01 Carol: -> Can I ask y'a question. 02 Joe: Yeah. 03 Carol: Yihknow Sally Smith? 04 Joe: Yeah. 05 Carol: An yih know that she's changed jobs. 06 Joe: yeah. 07 Carol: Well I want tuh get in touch with her but I don't know where 08 she is working now. 09 do you have her phone number^ 10 Joe: I think so. just a moment while I check.
In this extract, the pre-pre in line 1 provides both interactional space for further preliminaries and information about the nature of the projected main action (cf. Schegloff 1980: 116). Pre-pre’s frequently appear in this form of “Can I X?” (also as “Let me X”), with the projected action explicitly specified by “X” (Schegloff 2007: 44; see also Hoey 2020). In their function of projecting an action that is not to follow imminently, speakers use pre-pre’s to prepare the recipient for the projected main action, for example, by providing background information or introducing key referents, as in the above example (Schegloff 1980: 115, 2007: 236). The structurally preferred response to a pre-pre is a go-ahead in second position (Schegloff 2007: 44), as opposed to a blocking response.
In specific sequential environments, pre-pre’s are also used to frame a subsequent, potentially delicate action as such and to introduce it accordingly (see Schegloff 1980: 149, on 'pre-delicates').
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Cited References:
Hoey, E. M. (2020). Self-authorizing action: On let me X in English social interaction. Language in Society, 51, 95–118.
Liddicoat, A. J. (2007). An Introduction to Conversation Analysis. Continuum.
Schegloff, E. A. (1980). Preliminaries to Preliminaries: ‘Can I Ask You a Question?’. Sociological Inquiry, 50, 104–52.
Schegloff, E. A. (2007). Sequence Organization: A Primer in Conversation Analysis (Volume 1). Cambridge University Press.
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