Structure and Components of Conversation

Conversation is a string of at least two turns . Some turns are more closely related than others and isolates a class of sequences of turns called adjacency pairs which have the following features : there are two utterances long ; the utterances are produced successively by different speakers ; they are ordered the first must belong to the class of the first pair parts , the second to the class of second pair parts ; the utterances are related not any second pair can follow any first pair part ,but only an appropriate one ; the first pair part often selects next speaker and always selects next action- it thus set up transition relevance and expectation which the next speaker fulfils, in other words the first part of a pair predicates the occurrence of the second: given a question, regularly enough an answer will follow (Sacks (1967) as cited in Coulthard, 1985 :69).