#3 Adjacency Pairs and Track Signals

Adjacency pairs are pairs of utterances that occur between participants in conversation. They must consist of two ordered utterances, which are uttered by different people, and there must be a difference between the types of the utterances which marks their order. The content and manner of the second part of the adjacency pair must in some way be dependent on the same qualities of the first part, and the inverse (converse?) must be true as well: given the first part, the second part should be relevant and predictable as the second part.

Track 1 and 2 signals are signals in conversation that deal with different levels of the conversation. Track 1 is the communication concerned directly with the business at hand, the goal of the conversation. Track 2 signals are parts of the communication that are concerned with the signals in part 1: they are metacommunicative in that they are intended to communicate something about the communication occurring in track 1. Frequently, track 2 signals occur more in the background while track 1 signals are more prominently in the foreground of the conversation.

Face to face conversation

[1. greeting/question] A: Hey, what are you doing over here?
[1. greeting / answer ] B: Yo. Yeah, I work in the Space Sciences Building. I just ran out for a second to grab some coffee at Big Red Barn.
[2. assertion] A: You could have walked over to Gimme!5 and gotten much better coffee.
[2. assent / 3. argument] B: Yeah [track 2: understanding and agreement with A's statement], but that's over there. I'd have to walk. The barn is right there: I can see it from my office window.
[3. assent] A: Point.
[ 4. explanation ] B: See, the joke is that our office doesn't actually have any windows.
[5. assertion] A: That would have been a lot funnier if I'd known that earlier.
[ 5. assent] B: Yeah, probably.

AIM conversation

[1. question A: have you seen this gmail stuff? tell me if you figure out a way of turning off the mouseover popup. very annoying.
[1. clarification / answer] B: I have no idea what popovers you're talking about: do you have the gmail chat client already? because i don't. [track 2: attempt to clarify A's question and determine what portion of Gmail he is referring to, while taking a guess at what he means.]
that said, whatever the problem you're having is, you can probably fix it with greasemonkey.
[2. follow up question] A: so you dont have chat in gmail yet?
[2. response / 3. explanation] B: no, apparently they're pushing it out to people on a limited basis, like they did with customizable google home page. i'll probably have it inside a few days
[3. affirmation / 4. new topic] A: gotcha. yea, im using it right now. its decent
[4. acknowledgement / 5. question] B: cool.
i've heard a few complaints and some nice things. i hear it uses wiki-like markup for doing bold, italic, etc?
[5. answer] A: i wouldn't know, i dont do markups in im to be honest