Preference

Hi! Long time no see, huh? This week has been extremely busy. It all started on Sunday when we finally managed to arrange a meeting with our parents about... well, our wedding of course! Since I had worked all Friday and Saturday my plan was to catch the last bus to Helsinki on Sunday evening after our final meeting before the wedding. Well, guess what? I missed the final bus! I thought it would take two or three hours to plan a wedding reception for 160 people (now you must think I'm silly, right?) but it took more than that. At 8 o'clock when I finally arrived at my parents home I realised that the last bus was gone. When we at last got home on Monday morning I had to hurry: I had three articles and 100 pages of grammar waiting for me back home...

Besides watching "How I met your mother" on the TV at night with my boyfriend, when we were both so tired that our brains just weren't working anymore, I've again been reading all my articles in English. This week we were told to take one of the articles to the lesson with us. Afterwards we were told not to reflect on it yet. I'll do so anyway. (I'll promise to take a new article with me next time.) You see, I've noticed it's such a good way of memorizing stuff like words and new information when I write them down here. So this time I would like to reflect on an article called: "Preference" written by Anita Pomerazt from the University of Albany and John Heritage from University of California. The article was published in Tanya Stivers' and Jack Sidnell's book called "Handbook of Conversation Analysis".

"The core idea of preference is that participants follow principles, often implicit, when they act and react in a variety of interactional situations." (p.2) By participants the authors mean individuals who participate in a conversation or in some other interactional situation such as playing a board game. Sacks started the discussion of preference organization in conversation in his lectures in 1969 and 1971. He identified a number of rules considering conversation situations. One of them is recipient design, the fact that an individual designs his speech for the audience he has at the moment, in other words, orients to recipients. "If possible, select a description that you know that the other knows", he says. (Sacks 1992: II:148). This rule becomes visible when, for example, an individual identifíes a person. If the recipient knows the reference, the person they are talking about, it's common to use that person's first name as a referent. Otherwise you could say for example: "My neighbour" or "My friend". In his lecture (1992) Sacks also created questioner-preferred answers.These answers are given to polar questions or in other words, yes/no questions. Questions can be built to expect a preference to yes or no answers (ex. "You don't want that last piece of pie, do you?") and the preference is "If possible, avoid or minimize explicitly stated disconfirmation in favor of confirmation". This means we usually like to please the other person and if it's not possible to please we try to do as little damage in our relation to that other person, as possible.

How do we avoid outright disconfirmations in conversations then? We shape our responses and make them look like, at least, partial confirmations. So, if someone would ask you for a visit today but you know you're not gonna make it you could answer for example: "Oh, I'm afraid I can't do it today, but what about tomorrow?" Disconfirmation is not a problem only for a person who says "no" (the recipient) but it's also a problem for a person who made the invitation. We have different kinds of ways to predict someone is going to say "no" to our proposal just like delays, mitigations, understated components and accounts. "They also may have partial or weak versions of agreements/confirmations/acceptances incorporated in them." So if you hesitate to answer to your friends question ("Would you like to come over today?") your friend might guess you won't be able to come and quickly reformulate the sentence: "Or is tomorrow night better for you?" (I have to admit that I made up all these example sentences on my own and they are not part of the summary. It's just the easiest way of explaining the phenomena of spoken language with examples that could be part of real conversations.)

Besides disconfirmation, what other things are not preferred in conversation? One preference principle is "to minimize explicitly correcting the other's talk and/or action, if possible". People solve this kind of problems with an embedded correction. This means for example that if I would do a mistake in English grammar you wouldn't correct me directly but would hide the correct form into the next sentence, or in other words, you could repeat the correct form in your next turn. Another thing people avoid is making requests. There are ways to make a request indirectly such as to ask information or describing a problem and "providing opportunities for the co-participant to offer the goods or services".