14.11.2001: Dialogue: adjacency pairs, exchanges

Overview:

Dialogues are structured not only in terms of the speech acts produced by individuals but in terms of sequences of utterances produced in discourse by more than one person.

There are several methods of analysing these sequences:

• It is possible to base the analysis on linguistic forms, for instance on sentence types, relations between pronouns, or on prosody.
• Or utterances may be analysed in terms of their contribution to the dynamic development of the interaction.

Tasks:

1. Find definitions of the terms `interaction', `adjacency pair', `dialogue contribution', `uptake'
2. Look for discussion of work by Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson, and make a small bibliography of work on this topic.