The notion of the adjacency pair and its characteristics have been among the primary foci in discourse analysis research. Most of the research, however, has been based on personal discourse by a small number of discourse participants. Widening the sco...
The notion of the adjacency pair and its characteristics have been among the primary foci in discourse analysis research. Most of the research, however, has been based on personal discourse by a small number of discourse participants. Widening the scope and diversifying the types, this research is based on actual data corpus of discussions of formal nature with a large number of discourse participants, and tried to characterize adjacency pairs occurring in such discourses. As a groundwork for this research, an annotated corpus tagged with speech act and adjacency pair information has been developed. In order to make such information tagging possible with precision and efficiency, a tagset and an editing tool SORITAG were also developed. Among notable findings in this research with reference to adjacency pairs are that for an adjacency pair, it is essential that the speaker's giving utterance and the addressee's receiving utterance occur sequentially, and that as long as this is observed other requirements previously regarded as constraints, such as the adjacency constraint, the pattern observance constraint, etc., do not in fact function as constraints. With reference to discussion discourses, this paper identifies the typology of adjacency pairs providing explanations as to each of such types, and claims that the binary distinction of preferred vs, non-preferred categories is not optimal in certain cases, which thus leads us to proposing that, in addition to the two categories, introducing the third category, i.e. an intermediate transitional category between them, is necessary.