Announcing 'Stammering Research' - Stammering Research - UCL

Stammering Research. Vol. 1.
stammer, then, it is not just the elimination of unwanted silences at TRPs that is important, but also the
specific manner in which this is achieved. It is, however, important to point out that the steps that people
who stammer often take to reduce the impact of silent dysfluencies at TRPs are not without their
drawbacks, and as Hopper (1992:99) suggests, in attempting to minimise silences we thereby make overlap
more likely. The inevitable tension between these two opposites raises the possibility that the 'fear of
silence' experienced by people who stammer will generate additional difficulties in terms of overlapping
speech. While a consideration of the literature on simultaneous talk would serve to develop some of the
issues outlined above, it may be more productive, in the current context, to elaborate upon the notion of
turn-taking as a constraint by focusing on the organisation of adjacency pair sequences.
4.2 Adjacency pairs
One of the most basic, yet analytically powerful concepts so far devised by conversation analysts is the
adjacency pair. Closely tied in with the turn-taking system, this concept has contributed greatly to our
understanding of various aspects of the organization of conversations and may also be able to shed light on
certain features of stammering. Adjacency pairs are fundamental to the organization of conversation (see
Benson & Hughes 1983:175; Levinson 1983:304) and can be formally defined as 'adjacent utterances
produced by two different speakers where the production of the first part of the pair makes the production
of the second part sequentially relevant' (Benson & Hughes 1983:173). Adjacency pairs are ubiquitous in
conversation and paired utterances such as question/answer, greeting/greeting, offer/acceptance, and
compliment/response are familiar examples. While they also do considerable interactional work (including
opening and closing, selection of speakers and repair of the turn-taking system) their use involves the same
basic rule:
given the recognisable production of a first pair part, on its first possible completion its
speaker should stop and a next speaker should start and produce a second pair part from
the pair type the first is recognisably a member of (Schegloff and Sacks 1974:239).
A close examination of naturally occurring conversation reveals that Schegloff and Sack's
characterization does not always hold up, and that strict adjacency is too strong a requirement. In reality it
is often the case that first and second parts of adjacency pairs are separated by other talk and may even be
several turns apart. Nevertheless, by employing the concept of 'conditional relevance' (Schegloff
1968:1083) we are able to retain the structural import of adjacency pairs. So while the two parts of an
adjacency pair may be separated by an 'insertion sequence' (see Nofsinger 1991:61-65; Levinson 1983:304-
306) the second part still remains relevant and expectable. In other words, it is the expectation of the
second part, rather than the actual adjacency, that bonds the pair together (Nofsinger 1991:64). The first
part of an adjacency pair places a powerful conversational constraint on what follows, to the extent that a
failure to respond to a first part in the appropriate fashion will be interpreted as an 'official absence'
(Downes 1984:237).
Although telephone openings may 'seem a peculiar object on which to lavish scholarly attention'
(Schegloff 1986:111) they are probably the ideal place to begin our examination of adjacency pairs. The
seemingly routine and even trivial talk that occurs in these environments conceals an elaborate organisation
and, as Hopper (1992:51) observes, 'the telephone opening packs a great deal of information and
communicative accomplishment into just a few seconds'. One useful function that telephone openings
perform is to provide an 'anchor position' for the initiation of first topic and this is situated after a fairly
standard pattern of four core opening sequences: a summons/answer sequence; an identification/ sequence;
a greeting/greeting sequence; and an exchange of 'howareyou' sequences (Schegloff 1986:116). While it is
the caller who typically introduces the first topic (usually the reason for the call) its placement in the anchor
position is a collaborative achievement. There are procedures whereby the recipient can introduce first
topic and indeed a variety of opportunities exist for either participant to initiate first topic before the anchor
position and potentially control the shape of the conversation (Schegloff 1986:117). In this respect 'routine'
openings are not automatic responses designed to conform to a prespecified blueprint but rather are more
accurately characterised as interactional achievements.
As conversational openings are constructed primarily from adjacency pairs (in that the four core
opening sequences each represent a distinct type) a detailed examination of the ways in which people who
stammer cope with telephone beginnings should provide a valuable insight into the relationship, if any,
between stammering and adjacency pairs. Schegloff's (1968) analysis of five hundred telephone openings
demonstrated that the ringing of the phone should be regarded as the initial turn in the conversation because
it represents a nonlinguistic realisation of a caller's summoning act. The treatment of the telephone ring as
the first part of a summons/answer adjacency pair sequence explains why it is that the person being called,
the one with least information about the identity and purposes of the caller, speaks first. That the recipient
is under an intense obligation to respond is even demonstrated by the only exceptional case in Schegloff's
corpus, where the caller rather than the recipient spoke first. This can be understood as a reaction to the
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