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structurally simpler turns; in contrast dispreferred seconds are marked by various kinds of structural complexity. Thus dispreferred seconds are typically delivered: (a) after some significant delay; (b) with some preface marking their dispreferred status . . . ; (c) with some acount of why the preferred second cannot be performed. |
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Thus, in a basic four turn structure with a pre-sequence, the first turn checks out "whether some precondition obtains for the action to be performed" in the third turn. The second turn is "an answer indicating that the precondition obtains, often with a question or request to proceed" to the third turn. And the fourth turn is a response to the third. And, naturally: |
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Request refusals are dispreferred: therefore . . . to be avoided if possible. One major reason for utilizing a pre-request is then that it allows the producer to check out whether a request is likely to succeed, and if not to avoid one in order to avoid its subsequent dispreferred response, namely a rejection. |
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Though this may seem like going far afield merely to seek disquietude, it has an immediate application. For in our scene the utterance "I want to talk with you" is a pre-request in an attempt to make peace. And while the speech-act theorist cannot detect any morpho-syntactic or lexical indications in the phrase te volo, uxor, conloqui that mark its "indirect illocutionary force," the conversation analyst could point out that if the wife responds by saying ''Of course, darling, I'm so sorry about what happened," we would witness a "collapse of the four position sequence into the two-position sequence consisting of a position 1 turn followed by a position 4 turn." |
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Alcumena does not answer at once; she turns away. We may call this either delay (one of the ways in which dispreferred seconds are marked) or a silence which nevertheless occupies Alcumena's turn in the conversation and so will be construed as a response.20 Thereupon Juppiter asks, "Why do you turn away?" a second overture of peace, since it implies that she should at least face him and hear what he has to say. The first step in any peace process is for the warring parties to listen to one another. |
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When she answers Ita ingenium meumst: / inimicos semper osa sum optuerier ("That's the way I am: I loathe looking at enemies" 899900), she is not describing her character or normal behavior, but implying that he is an enemy, and so affirming that a "state of war" exists between them. Juppiter picks this up: Heia autem inimicos? ("Oh, so it's enemies, then, is it?"). Nor is this merely a metalinguistic comment. He is asking her not to treat him as an enemy, giving her another chance to make peace at the |
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20 Levinson (1983) 329, commenting on the function of silence in another context, writes that "silence has no features of its own: all the different significances attributed to it must have their sources in the structural expectations engendered by the surrounding talk. So sequential expectations are not only capable of making something out of nothing, but also of constructing many different kinds of significance out of the sheer absence of talk. If conversational organization can map 'meaning' onto silence, it can also map situated significance onto utterances and in fact can be shown to regularly do so." |
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