CONVERSATION ANALYSISfirst turn in the sequence, the summons, projected
a relevant next action, an answer, to be accom-
plished by the recipient of the summons in the
very next turn. Moreover, the occurrence of the
expected answer cannot properly be the final turn
in the exchange. The summons–answer exchange
is therefore nonterminal: Upon production of the
answer, the summoner is then expected to speak
again, to provide the reason for the summons.
This provides for a coordinated entry into conver-
sation, and for the possibility of an extended
spate of talk.
Observe that a set of mutual obligations is
established by the structural relationships between
these sequence parts, with each current action
projecting some ‘‘next.’’ In the strongest form of
these obligations (sequence classes vary in this
regard), the property of ‘‘conditional relevance’’
holds between the parts of a sequence unit. A
‘‘summons–answer’’ sequence is but one type of a
large class of utterance units, known as ‘‘adjacency
pairs,’’ that are characterized by this property.
Examples here include ‘‘greeting–greeting,’’ ‘‘ques-
tion–answer,’’ and ‘‘invitation–acceptance/decli-
nation.’’ In adjacency pairs, when one utterance or
action is conditionally relevant on another, the
production of the first provides for the occurrence
of the second. It could be said, then, using the
example above, that the issuance of a summons is
an action that selects a particular next action, an
answer, for its recipient. If this action does not
occur, its nonoccurrence will be a noticeable event.
That is to say, it is not only nonoccurring, it is
notably, ‘‘officially’’ absent; accordingly, this would
warrant various inferences and actions. For in-
stance, the summoner might infer that a recipient
‘‘didn’t hear me,’’ which would provide for the
relevance and grounds of a repetition of the
summons.
The discovery that human activities like con-
versation were coordinated and organized in a
very fundamental way by such methodic relation-
ships between actions, with some current or ‘‘first’’
action projecting and providing for some appro-
priate ‘‘second,’’ led to investigations into the
various methods by which the recipient of a first
may accomplish a second, or recognizably hold its
accomplishment in abeyance until issues relevant
to its performance are clarified or resolved, or
avoid its accomplishment altogether by undertak-
ing some other activity. Researchers learned, for
example, that for some firsts, there was not a single
appropriate second but rather a range of alterna-
tive seconds. Note that in the examples of adjacen-
cy pair structures listed just above, invitations
project either an acceptance or a declination as a
course of action available to the recipient. In this
case, and in others like ‘‘request–granting/denial’’
and ‘‘compliment–acceptance/rejection,’’ it was
found that the alternative second parts are not
generally of equal status; rather, some second
parts are preferred and others dispreferred, these
properties being distinct from the desires or moti-
vations of the coparticipants. ‘‘Preference’’ thus
refers to a structural rather than dispositional
relationship between alternative but nonequiva-
lent courses of action. Evidence for this includes
distributional data across a wide range of speakers
and settings, and, more important, the fact that
preferred and dispreferred alternatives are regu-
larly performed in distinctively different ways. The
preference status of an action is therefore exhibit-
ed in how it is done.Related to this, conversation analytic research-
ers observed that the producers of a first action
often dealt in systematic, methodic ways with these
properties of preference organization. To take
one example, the producer of a request can and
often does analyze the recipient silence that fol-
lows as displaying or implicating a denial—a deni-
al as-yet-unstated, but nevertheless projected—
and seeks to preempt the occurrence of this
dispreferred action by issuing a subsequent ver-
sion of the request, before the recipient starts to
speak. Subsequent versions attempt to make the
request more acceptable and provide another op-
portunity for a favorable response (Davidson 1984).Moreover, members were observed to orient
to the properties of preference organization through
their performance of actions plainly meant to be
understood as specifically preliminary to some
adjacency pair first action. Such ‘‘pre"-type actions
are designed to explore the likelihood that pro-
ducing that first part of some pair will not be
responded to in a dispreferred way. For instance,
an utterance like ‘‘Are you doing anything to-
night?’’ provides, in a methodical way, an opportu-
nity for its producer to determine, without yet
having to actually issue the invitation, whether it
would most likely be declined. Similarly, this pro-
vides an opportunity for the recipient of the ‘‘pre’’