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At this point (897898) Alcumena sees Juppiter and the encounter begins. To understand their dialogue we must draw on information about setting, situation, social, linguistic and cultural conventions, the prior relationship between participants,18 and their intentions. Otherwise, what could we make of Juppiter's opening remark: Te volo, uxor, conloqui. / quo te avortisti? ("Wife, I want to speak with you. Why do you turn away?" 898899). Speech-act theory would be hard-pressed to tell us how it functions in this context (is it a declaration of intent, a summons, an order?), but a few concepts from conversation analysis may help.19 |
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Participants in a conversation take turns, but an adjacency pair need not be realized in a single pair of turns. Between the first and second part of an adjacency pair there may be an insertion sequence, a series of intervening turns (theoretically open ended). The second position in an adjacency pair might therefore occupy the fourth turn. For example: |
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Did you read the Wittgenstein? |
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Okay, I'll be right there. |
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Here a second adjacency pair (turns 2 and 3) is inserted between the invitation in turn 1 and the acceptance in turn 4. Furthermore, a request (or invitation or offer, etc.) may be preceded by a pre-request (or pre-invitation, and so on): |
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Would you like to come over? |
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Such pre-sequences are part of preference-organization. Levinson (1983) 307 explains: |
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not all the potential second parts to a first part of an adjacency pair are of equal standing: there is a ranking operating over the alternatives such that there is at least one preferred and one dispreferred category of response. It must be pointed out immediately that the notion of preference is not a psychological one, in the sense that it does not refer to speakers' or hearers' individual preferences. Rather it is a structural notion that corresponds closely to the linguistic concept of markedness. In essence, preferred seconds are unmarked they occur as |
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18 Of course in this case, the prior relationship between the participants is complex, since for Alcumena this includes both her relationship with Amphitruo, with whom she has just had a bitter argument (659854), and her relationship with the disguised Juppiter, with whom she had spent a long and presumably pleasant night (cf. 473474) followed by a loving farewell (499545). |
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19 The ensuing exposition is based on Levinson (1983). |
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