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interaction, news interviews, debates, political speeches, etc. In analysing talk-in- interaction, CA researchers do not underline the difference between the formal or
the informal talks, or the everyday or the institutional talks, but do put great emphasis on understanding the social process in which the talks are practised and
managed by conversationalists in particular contexts Liddicoat, 2007: 6. As an approach to the study of human communication, CA is frequently
associated with other approaches concerned with the study of language use. A lot of literature commonly incorporate CA into the scope of several linguistic
approaches such as Discourse Analysis DA, Pragmatics and Sociolinguistics. In fact, CA is not a part of any linguistic approaches because it actually originates
from a sociological approach. CA develops from ethnomethodology, one field of sociology which aims at revealing the methods through which people in society
achieve the orderliness of everyday activities Liddicoat, 2007: 2. Using ethnomethodology as the foundation, CA sets out to examine the procedures that
conversationalists use and rely on to perform social actions through talk. Since the role of CA is to understand what people do with talk, the main
task of CA involves investigating various things related to interactional activities. CA works to scrutinize the ways people take turns at talk, the ways they organize
actions into sequences of talk, and the ways they cope with problems of speaking, hearing or understanding talk Wilkinson and Kitzinger, 2011: 23. Cutting 2002:
24 mentions that CA observes the patterns of how turns are taken by speakers during conversation and of how what speakers say affects the type of response
expected. With regard to this, there are many conversational phenomena dealing
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with CA research, including turn-taking, adjacency pairs, sequence organization, preference structure, repair, interruption, and some others.
2. The Scope of Conversation Analysis
Conversation Analysis embraces a range of subjects for investigations which particularly concentrate on the organization of conversation. The following
section provides the general descriptions of several subjects dealing with CA.
a. Adjacency Pairs
As a matter of fact, there are a lot of turns at talk that happen as pairs. Those turns do not simply occur independently of each other, but rather are
connected with one another with a particular relationship. The phenomena of the paired turns in conversation are commonly known as adjacency pairs. Yule
1996: 77 contends that adjacency pairs are pairs of two sequential utterances spoken by different speakers in which the second utterance serves as a response to
the first. Moreover, b
orrowing Harvey Sacks’ term,
Chaika 1982: 76 calls the paired turns as utterance pairs which she defines as sequences of two utterances
in which one utterance promotes the emergence of another of a certain type. As she explains, the first half of an utterance pair contains an idea that gives an order
to the recipient to produce an appropriate response in the second half. Technically, adjacency pairs consist of two turns or utterances with an
ordered position. One of them is known to appear before or after the other. According to Wilkinson and Kitzinger 2011: 26, the turn that comes first is
conventionally labelled as a first pair part FPP, while the other which comes second is termed a second pair part SPP. An FPP is a preliminary turn where an
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action is initiated, for instance, a question in a question-answer pair. Furthermore, an SPP is a turn following an FPP where a particular next action is established in
response to the FPP, such as an answer in a question-answer pair. Liddicoat 2007: 106 informs that the production of an SPP is dependent
on the type of the FPP produced. The SPP should be of the appropriate type for the action launched in the FPP since not any SPP is acceptable to a particular type
of FPP. For example, an FPP of question must not be followed by a farewell or a greeting although these are possible SPPs for other types of FPP. The question
should be followed by an answer SPP to constitute a complete sequence. This consideration is based on the notion that sequences in conversation are formed
from a number of coherent actions. In this sense, a set of actions performed in adjacency pairs are organized into sequences in a sensible way.
There are many forms of adjacency pairs in conversation mentioned by linguists via their writing. Some of the forms are presented below as examples.
The first three examples are taken from Yule 1996: 77, whereas the rest are quoted from Liddicoat 2007: 107.
1 Question-answer
A: What time is it? B: About eight-thirty.
4 Summons-answer
Terry: Hey, Paul. Paul: Uh yeah.
2 Thanking-response
A: Thanks.
B: You’re welcome.
5 Greeting-greeting
Amy: Hello. Jean: Hi.
3 Request-accept
A: Could you help me with this? B: Sure.
6 Telling-accept
John: I’ve just finished
my last exam.
Betty: That’s great.
