Pragmatic structure in appointment-making conversations

Conversational structure was examined by applying pragmatic and sequential analyses to two-party, single-purpose conversations. A subgoal achievement label was given to each talking turn of 93 automatically tape-recorded telephone conversations between native English-speaking beauty salon receptionists and a confederate female caller. The confederate played a standardized, nonleading role in getting an appointment for a haircut. Lag sequential analyses showed that these conversations have subgoal structures and that some structures are more prevalent than others. Regularities were attributed to social and organizational problems that appointment making presents and that pragmatic theory addresses.This study was completed as past of the first author's doctoral dissertation.     

Knowledge of Pragmatic Conversational Structure

Knowledge of conversational pragmatic structure was examined by asking 53 female volunteers to rate the naturalness of three versions of an appointment-making conversation from a beauty salon. One version was the naturally occurring conversation. The other two were its two most frequent reconstructions created by a separate group of subjects asked to put the scrambled natural conversation back together again. A chi-square lest and standardized deviates showed that the naturally occurring conversation was rated as the most natural one. This result is attributed to subjects' implicit knowledge about conversational pragmatic structure. The role that this knowledge might play in language comprehension is discussed.     

Pragmatic Structure in Naturally Occurring Conversations for Making Appointments

Conversational structure was examined by applying pragmatic and sequential analyses to two-party, single-purpose, spontaneous conversations between acquaintances. A subgoal achievement label was given to each talking turn of 60 automatically tape-recorded telephone conversations between beauty salon receptionists and clients phoning to make appointments. Lag sequential analyses showed that these conversations have subgoal structures that resemble the ones found in quasinaturalistic appointment-making conversations between strangers. The results are discussed in terms of what was predicted about the degree of generalizability from quasinaturalistic appointment-making conversations between strangers to natural appointment-making conversations between acquaintances.