Explanation of why the concept of preference matters in conversation analysis
Written by:
Fahd Al Alwi
April 2008
The most central assumption of Conversation Analysis (CA) is that ordinary talk is a highly organized, ordered phenomenon and its aim is to reveal the tacit, organized reasoning procedures which inform the production of naturally occurring talk. (Hutchby & Wooffitt, 1998: 1) This is based on the idea that speakers do not use utterances just to exchange information but they employ them as tools to accomplish particular actions when interacting with others and they organize these actions with systematic conventionalized practices. The notion of ‘preference’ in CA, significantly, contributes to the understanding of the order of talk in interaction because it indicates how the organization of the conversational events is accomplished by selections based on institutionalized rankings.
Preference organization is among other normative organizations (such as turn-taking and sequence organization) which operate in interaction and it provides the means by which one action is pursued over another. (Clift, 2004) This is because preference is a powerful inferential device which facilitates through grammatical and prosodic resources the recognition and interpretation of the actions taking place in interaction. (Levinson, 1983; Clift, 2004).
In Atkinson and Heritage’s (1984: 53) words:
‘‘The concept of ‘preference’ (..) characterizes conversational events in which alternative, but nonequivalent, courses of action are available to participants .. Such alternatives may arise at the level of lexical selection, utterance design, and action or sequence choice… The term “preference” refers to a range of phenomena associated with the fact that choices among nonequivalent courses of action are routinely implemented in ways that reflect an institutionalized ranking of alternatives’’
Thus, preference organization seems to operate within and across sequences and it can provide an explanation for how turns are designed and sequences of actions are organized. Specifically, it seems to define the way that actions are formulated within turns, the way problems within sequences are dealt and the way that sequences are organized. Based on systematic practices of designing turns which are employed in terms of preference, interlocutors are able to display the kind of action they are doing or to make inferences from the actions of the other participants.
The notion of preference illustrates that structures not only are categorized into preferred and dispreferred but that they also have different format depending on which category they belong to. (Hutchby & Wooffitt; 1998, Schegloff, 2007; Levinson, 1983; Atkinson & Heritage, 1984) For instance, an acceptance (given that it is considered a preferred response) to an offer like ‘how about going to the cinema tonight?’ would have a different structure from a refusal (which is considered a dispreferred response) to the same offer; that is, probably, the acceptance would be formulated in a more simple way such as ‘that sounds great’ while a refusal would be more structurally complex and such as ‘well, I am not sure I can tonight, cause I have to work on my project’. It is exactly because of these differences in structures that the participants in a conversation infer whether the action performed by the other is a preferred one or a dispreferred and therefore he/she formulate his/her next turn.
In the subsequent pages, I will refer to different types of structures, such as first and second pair parts of an adjacency pair, presequences and sequences, in order to indicate how preference operates.
Before proceeding, it is necessary to emphasize that the concept of preference does not refer to psychological aspects or to personal preferences of the participants; rather, it is related with preferences for certain social structures in interaction. (Hutchby & Wooffitt, 1998; Levinson, 1983; Schegloff, 2007; Atkinson & Heritage, 1984) Specifically, it has to do with social solidarity which people try to achieve through their social actions including talk-in-interaction. Participants employ several practices in order to show cooperation in a conversation and this is mainly worked out by choosing preferred structures such as agreements and acceptances over negative ones such as disagreements, declines and others. (Hutchby & Wooffitt, 1998: 46)
This means that independently of the interlocutors’ personal preferences, they have the tendency to produce preferred structures in order to accomplish the interaction. What is more, as we will see in the following pages, whenever a dispreferred structure seems forthcoming, then interlocutors independently of whether he/she is the recipient or the ‘initiator’ they try to reach a preferred structure or to avoid as much as possible a dispreferred one. For example, Schegloff (2007) claims that an invitation once issued, has a dynamic of its own. Invitation sequences “prefer” acceptances and “disprefer” declines, and this is so whatever the personal preference of the participants for the particular event at issue.
Another example provided as well by Schegloff (2007) is the summons/answer sequence, which is designed to activate or confirm the availability, attention, and aligned ‘recipiency’ of its addressed target. One type of response to a summon is the go-ahead response and this fulfills what the sequence is designed to do; that is, it the recipient displays that he/she is available or is attending the interaction. Therefore, this is the preferred response while the dispreferred response is a blocking response which prevents the accomplishment of the sequence. Certainly, these differences influence the way that each of the responses is formed up.
It is noteworthy to mention here that what is considered preferred structure depends on the context of the interaction. This means that not always an agreement is a preferred structure or a disagreement always a dispreferred one. (Hutchby & Wooffitt, 1998:46) For instance, in responding to actions such as assessment, agreements are normally preferred; however, in a context when in the first pair part, one criticizes themselves, that is in self-deprecation (as in ‘I am good at nothing’) a disagreement is conventionally preferred in the second pair part (as in ‘of course not, you are exaggerating’).
Furthermore, the same structural feature, such as a pause for example, is not always categorized as belonging to one of the two categories (preferred-dispreferred); a pause could display different actions depending on whether it is after an ordinary assessment or after self-deprecating. (Levinson, 1983: 333) Similarly, Schegloff (2007), claims that features normally used to display a dispreferred response may be used to deliver a preferred response and vice versa.
Preference organization is very basic in the sequences of adjacency pairs where a first pair part initiates a relevant second pair part such as a question as a first pair part initiates an answer as a second pair part, a request an acceptance and an assessment an agreement. Some adjacency pairs have fixed second pair parts (SPP) to first pair parts (FPP); for example, an FPP- greeting (hello) expects as an SPP another greeting (hi, hello) which might be somehow different but it is still the same type of greeting. (Schegloff, 2007)
Nevertheless, certain first pair parts make alternative actions relevant in second position. The alternative SPPs though (as already mentioned) are not of equal status. (Schegloff, 2007; Levinson, 1983) On the contrary, some of them are more preferred than others. According to Hutchby, Wooffitt (1998) and Schegloff (2007), some of these SPP are considered + responses and others –responses and this differentiation is not without implications for their structure. Specifically, it is noted that dispreferred responses from different adjacency pairs have more features in common than do preferred and dispreferred responses of the same adjacency pair.(Levinson, 1983: 333) According to Hutchby and Wooffitt (1998:45), the preferred actions are characteristically performed straightforwardly and without delay, while dispreferred actions are delayed, qualified and accounted for.
An example could illustrate this point better:
1. A: Do you mind turning on the volume=
B: =No, that’s ok
2. A: Do you mind turning on the volume.
B: hh Well, actually I do.
In both examples, the FPP is an assessment, and normally an agreement is a preferred SPP to it, but in this case, the preferred response is a disagreement and the dispreferred (response) an agreement. (As mentioned earlier a preferred response does not always correspond to an agreement or to an acceptance) In the first example, B formulates a preferred response by displaying the features of a positive response; that is, the turn is of simple design and its transition happens in the transition relevant place (TRP). The latter means that the second turn follows the first one immediately after the position where the transition of the turns can occur is displayed in the first turn. (Sacks, Schegloff, Jefferson, 1974)
On the contrary, in the second example, B employs a dispreferred turn format which is delaying the response with markers or announcers of dispreferreds such as hh, well and actually. Levinson (1983: 334) refers to several features of dispreferred turns, namely, delays (which are usually achieved by pauses, prefaces, repair initiators or insertion sequences), prefaces (which are formulated with the use of markers or announcers of dispreferreds like Uh and well, the production of token agreements before disagreements, the use of appreciations or apologies, the use of qualifiers and hesitations), accounts (for the production of the dispreferred form) and declination components.
Therefore, whenever we aim to produce a dispreferred response we employ a dispreferred turn format and, respectively, the same with the preferred one. According to Levinson (1983: 337), over the course of a single turn’s construction, interactional feedback is being systematically taken into consideration. Similarly, Pomerantz (as cited in Hutchby & Wooffitt, 1998: 45) claims that participants do not do preferred or dispreferred responses rather they formulate their responses as preferred or as dispreferred.
However, it should not be considered that the alignment in a conversation is one-sided, that is, one interlocutor initiates a sequence and the other just follows; rather the cooperation for the fulfillment of a sequence is maintained by all the members of the interaction. This means that FPPs, as well, are organized based on the concept of preference and they are designed in that way in order to avoid dispreferred SPPs.
First of all, we need to recall that FPP speakers as well have many alternative structures available but they are not structurally equivalent alternative. They are usually designed in order to get certain social actions done or in order to achieve some interactional outcome. (Levinson, 1983; Hutchby & Wooffitt, 1998) For example, an FPP ‘you don’t mind turning on the volume, do you?’ project to the recipient different inferences about his/her actual preferences than another FPP like ‘do you mind turning on the volume?’
The fact that FPPs are designed to avoid dispreferred SPPs could, also, be indicated by the existence of pre-sequences or pre-expansions. Schegloff (2007) claims that ‘pre-sequences or pre-expansions are measures undertaken by the speaker - or the prospective speaker - of a first pair part to maximize the occurrence of a sequence with a preferred second pair part’. For example, a pre-invitation such as ‘what are you doing tonight?’ is employed by a speaker in order to avoid a rejection to an invitation like ‘how about driving to town?’.
Moreover, not only are FPP designed so as to avoid dispreferred responses but even when they are already accomplished they might be rephrased if an indication of a dispreferred SPP is eminent. Specifically, based on Pomerantz’s findings that the recipient’s pauses are usually analysed as implicating a yet-unstated dispreferred action, Davidson demonstrates that these pauses are usually followed by subsequent versions of FPPs in order to preempt the occurrence of a dispreferred SPP. (as cited in Atkinson & Heritage, 1984 : 55) For example, a speaker initiates a sequence such as an assessment (‘This room looks awful’) and then according to the turn taking system (as developed by Sacks, Jefferson & Schegloff, 1974) the other speaker is expected to speak next; if this does not happen and there is a longer than expected pause then the first speakers draws inferences from this and in this case the inference is that a dispreferred SPP is forthcoming. Therefore, the first speaker reformulates his initial assessment, so that he can achieve a preferred SPP.
The reformulation of an FPP is also initiated by its recipient (SPP) as well and this means that the preference organization does not influence only a turn subsequent to a first turn but it can affect a number of turns. According to Levinson (1983: 339) SPP interlocutors usually prefer to displace a dispreferred SPP from a second turn into a fourth so that they provide the FPP speaker with the opportunity to re-shape the initial turn (whether it was an offer, an assessment or an invitation) in order to increase the possibilities of a preferred SPP.
Preference organization routinely operates within and across turns and this is also indicated by the organization of repair which is a central conversational device. (Levinson, 1983: 339) In the case of repairs as well we have alternative types of sequences which could be categorized as preferred or dispreferred. Specifically, there are self initiated repairs as contrasted to other initiated repairs and also self- repair as contrasted to other-repair. The construction of repair sequences is not done arbitrarily; rather it is based on a ranking set of preferences. Thus, as analysis of conversational data has indicated, there is clear preference for self-initiated repair and self- repair over the other two (other- initiated self repair and other repair). (Schegloff, Jefferson & Sacks, 1977; Levinson, 1983: 340) The fact that this preference has an implication on the formulation of the repair sequences could be indicated with several examples, but looking into a dispreferred structure is more illustrative of this. Other- corrections sequence occur very rarely and when they do, they tend to be modulated in form or downgraded on a ‘confidence/ uncertainty’ scale by using in the correction uncertainty markers or by use of various types of question format. (Schegloff, Jefferson & Sacks, 1977: 378)
The notion of preference is also important in several other sequences and it would be useful to indicate a few where the ‘preference’ defines its structure. First, Schegloff 2002: 291-292) investigating the beginnings of the so-called ‘personal’ or ‘domestic’ calls (or in other words not institutional conversational calls) realized that there was a preference to be recognized- whether caller or answerer- rather than having to identify oneself; he added that this preference did not only lead to elaborate, nuanced exchanges to allow such recognitions to occur, but to cheating as well, that is claiming recognition when none had in fact occurred. This preference is also clearly confirmed by the celebration which follows the recognition of the caller by the answerer (Schegloff, 2007)
Second, preference organization seems to operate in guessing bad news sequences where the bearer of bad tidings activates an institutionalised mechanism for guiding recipients of bad news to better guesses of what the news is about rather than stating it explicitly (Schegloff, 1988: 443). Thus, it usually happens that the one who actually says the bad news is the recipient not the one who brings the information. Otherwise, when this does not happen, when the conveyor of bad news does actually say the utterance which bears it, the news may be formulated in somewhat equivocal terms, leaving it for the recipient to articulate it in its basic, unambiguous form. (Schegloff, 1988: 444)
Finally, it is interesting to note that even in sequences where cross-cutting principles are at work, the preference component seems to operate quite powerfully. One such case is when the preference for + responses come into conflict with social norms. This is noticeable in responses to compliments, where a social norm against self- praise clashes with the structural preference for agreement and specifically for upgraded agreement. (Pomerantz as cited in Psathas, 2007: 39-42) In these cases, second pair parts systematically employ practices such as rejections, praise downgrade or scaled down agreements with more moderate terms in order to avoid self-praise but in the meantime produce a preferred features response. (Pomerantz as cited in Psathas, 2007: 39-42).
Conclusion
In this work, I have shown that the preference component in talk is not only significant for the frequency of the occurrence of some structures but also for their construction. There are systematic practices that interlocutors, motivated by the preference mechanism, employ in their interaction.
The institutionalized design features of preferred/ dispreferred actions are both inherently structured and actively used so as to maximize cooperation and affiliation and to minimize conflict in conversational activities. (Levinson, 1983) Since CA is concerned with the produced order of the talk-in-interaction and the practices which arrange this order, then the notion of preference is of crucial importance.
References
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Schegloff, E.A. (2007) Sequence Organization: A Primer in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: CUP.
