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Structural Feature.
McCarthy. 1998: 50 proposes that there are three structural units fundamental to all spoken interaction. They emerge from a wide range of studies
in discourse and conversational analysis: the transaction, the exchange and the adjacency pair.
1. Transaction
Term transaction Sinclair and Coulthard 1975 use is to label stretches of talk identified by certain type of activity at their boundaries because like the
paragraph in written language, the transaction has no pre-defined length and is only recognizable by its boundaries. It is difficult, of course, to imagine that talk
runs effectively with no participants signaling in some way or other and recognizing such boundaries. So as a structure, transaction can be put into a
discourse universal. As unit of discourse, the transaction is further said that it possibly
presents us with a problem on two distinction levels. On the first level, there may be a problem of awareness among both teacher and learner if we talk about
classroom talk that transaction signaling is an important part of behaving linguistically in the target language. On the second one, the problem is principally
a lexical one. It talks about how the target language realize the marking and whether the second language literal lexical equivalents for items like ‘Good’ and
‘Now then’ as well as those used for marking purpose .
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2. The Exchange
As the minimum structural unit of interaction, it contains an initiation and a response. But then in casual conversation, it may include the follow-up, the
third function. With those three functions; the first function the initiation, the second
function the response and the third function the follow-up, the exchange is in fact often realized in quite complex configuration
3. The Adjacency pair
The adjacency pair is usually conducted from an ethnomethodological stand point Mc Carthy,1998: 54. It is concerned with how participants behave in
interaction in terms of alignment how they position themselves socially in relation to their interlocutors, achieving goals, negotiating outcomes etc.
Sometimes speakers or participants may take a definite stand in what they say. They take a position or assert a proposition and are prepared to defend it in
argument David Butt et al 1995: 78-9. Seen from the metalanguage portion when speakers are definite about
their propositions, the finite always encodes the time of the action in relation to the speakers and it is very important if we are to argue about a clause. It is the
Subject-Finite relationship which allow discussion of the proposition contained in a clause.
2.3 Definition of the Exchange
