Whatever happened to preference organisation?

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Journal of Pragmatics 32 (2000) 583~504 www.elsevier.nl/locate/pragma

Whatever happened to preference organisation? Ronald Boyle Department of English, Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University, Pathumwan, Bangkok 10330, Thailand

Abstract Preference organisation was once a prominent concept in conversation analysis, but it has been construed in a number of mutually incompatible ways and it is now used in a very restricted manner. With the publication of Harvey Sacks' collected lectures, however, it has been possible to take a fresh look at the concept and to provide a criterion of preference. This paper shows that preference can be explained in terms of noticeable absence and accountability. The preferred action is the "seen but unnoticed" action (Garfinkel, 1967), whereas the dispreferred action is of two types. The first is noticeable and accountable, but not sanctionable, while the second is noticeable, accountable and sanctionable. The paper shows how this concept operates in three key lectures by Sacks and in data extracts. © 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Preference; Conversation analysis; Ethnomethodology; English; Discourse

1. Introduction Almost a decade ago, Boden (1990: 2 5 2 - 2 5 3 ) expressed a widely held view of the achievements of Conversation Analysis (CA) when she said that 'researchers working with everyday conversational materials have uncovered a veritable gold mine o f "structures o f social action" '. Collections published in subsequent years have only served to reinforce that evaluation (Boden and Zimmerman, 1991; Drew and Heritage, 1992; Firth, 1995; ten Have and Psathas, 1995; Watson and Seiler, 1992). As conversation analysis has developed and diversified (Drew, 1990; Schegloff, 1991 ; Z i m m e r m a n and Boden, 1991), it is surprising to observe, however, that preference organisation, which is one o f the notable discoveries o f conversation analysis, has now b e c o m e little more than a footnote in the literature, and has been I am indebted to Dr Keith Richards (Aston University), Dr Paul Seedhouse (Newcastle University) and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on this article. 0378-2166/00/$ - see front matter © 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S0378-2166(99)00060-0

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omitted entirely from one recent introduction to conversation analysis (Psathas, 1995). Another recent introduction, Hutchby and Wooffitt (1998), treats preference as "a key analytic concept" of CA along with adjacency pairs, the rules of turn-taking, the management of overlapping talk, and the organisation of repair. However, while this introduction does describe certain features of preference organisation, it is significant that it does not then employ the notion in nearly one hundred and fifty pages of data analysis. This paper will show that while preference organisation is often discussed in introductory texts in discourse analysis and pragmatics, it is rarely employed in data analysis. The paper will argue, therefore, that the failure of Hutchby and Wooffitt (1998) to use the concept is predictable, and that the cause of the problem is the absence from the literature of a clear and practical description of preference. Preference is referred to as one of the key discoveries of conversation analysis, because it was central to the classic, early work on repair (Moerman, 1977; Schegloff et al., 1990), on responses to compliments (Pomerantz, 1978), on the organisation of reference to others (Sacks and Schegloff, 1979), on the placement of agreements (Sacks, [1973] 1987), and on responses to accusations (Atkinson and Drew, 1979). The importance of preference resides in the fact that it is concerned with how actions are constituted and responded to, and with how intersubjective understanding is achieved. Hence, Bilmes (1988: 162) described it as "one of the most general and frequently mentioned analytical notions in CA". However, he also predicted its demise by noting that it has been construed "in a variety of mutually incompatible, and sometimes methodologically questionable, ways". These "incompatible interpretations" have caused researchers to raise questions about the practical value of the concept (Coupland et al., 1992: 225-227; Mazeland et al., 1995: 292), and it survives primarily in work on agreement and disagreement (Ahrens, 1997; Greatbatch, 1992; Kotthoff, 1993; Taylor, 1994). This paper will describe the different ways in which preference has been construed, and it will put forward a description of preference that both accommodates the varied interpretations and provides a clear and simple account of the notion. In doing so, it will rely heavily on the collected lectures of Harvey Sacks (1992a,b). The choice of Sacks' lectures as the primary source of this work is not intended to suggest that only Sacks' writings are capable of providing an answer. The importance of the contribution of Schegloff, Jefferson, Garfinkel, Moerman, Pomerantz and others to the development of the field has long been evident, and can be seen both in the existence of many joint publications (Garfinkel and Sacks [1970] 1990; Jefferson et al., 1987; Moerman, 1988: 180-186; Sacks and Schegloff, 1979; Sacks et al., 1974; Schegloff et al., [1977] 1990), and in numerous important individual papers (e.g. Jefferson, 1972, 1980, 1985; Moerman, 1977, 1988; Pomerantz, 1978, 1984; Schegloff, 1968, 1972, 1986, 1988). However, what the collected lectures provide is an opportunity to trace the origins and development of preference organisation through approximately one hundred and seventy lectures delivered between the Fall semester of 1964 and the Spring semester of 1972. The collection is therefore a unique resource. As Coulter (1995: 329) says, the lectures are "a fund of elaborate analytical achievements" and they demon-

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strate that "with uncanny precision, Sacks was able to discern the abstract in the concrete, the general in the particular and the analytically fascinating within the quotidian detail". The lectures offer an abundance of insights into "how human action actually works" (ibid.: 328), and they permit the reader to see how preference organisation emerges from Sacks' investigation of the orderly nature of social interaction (Sacks, 1984). This paper will show that the lectures can provide a means of resolving the incompatibilities that Bilmes (1988) identified in the interpretations of preference, and that they can explain, for example, why Frankel (1990) and ten Have (1991) are right to say that patient-initiated questions in the data gathering phase of a doctor-patient interaction are dispreferred, why Kotthoff (1993) is right to say that student disagreement with professors can be a preferred action, and why Schegloff (1986) is right to say that certain ways of answering the telephone are dispreferred. What these different expressions of preference have in common, and what Kotthoff 1993: 194) mentions briefly, is that "... certain contexts evoke expectations for specific preferred actions. When that action is not taken, it is experienced as being relevantly absent. Its noticeable absence is typically used as a basis for further inferences." Although preference is frequently discussed in terms of markedness, frequency of occurrence, or 'face' and social solidarity, this paper will argue that 'noticeable absence' and 'accountability' can provide a clear and comprehensive criterion of preference, and it will draw on three key lectures from Sacks (1992a,b) in order to support this claim. It will begin, however, by describing briefly the ways in which preference, as Bilmes (1988) says, has been 'misconstrued', because they are widely reported in texts on discourse analysis and pragmatics (Cook, 1989; Coulthard, 1985; Levinson, 1983; Mey, 1993; Yule, 1996). This paper, however, views these 'misconstruals' as valid aspects of preference, and will therefore refer to them as 'aspects' rather than 'misconstruals'.

2. Aspects of preference organisation Bilmes (1988) explains that the notion of preference has been used primarily to characterise the relationship of the second pair part of an adjacency pair to the first pair part, so that, as Sacks (1987: 56) says: "For any given first pair part, there may be a bunch more second pair parts that can be introduced; but it is enough to say that for most of the adjacency pair types, there are alternatives in the second pair part slot. For some, you pretty much have to do a given thing, but for most of them there are alternatives. That is to say, having been given an offer, you can do either an acceptance or a rejection, and both of them are 'legal'." Of these alternative second pair parts, one has been referred to in the literature as 'preferred' and the other as 'dispreferred', but the problem for the researcher has been how to say which is which, and what exactly the terms 'preferred' and 'dispre-

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ferred' mean, because, before the publication of the collected lectures (Sacks, 1992a,b), Sacks' published papers contained no explicit statement of the nature and extent of preference organisation. The consequence of this is that Sacks' interpreters were able, during the 1980s, to construe preference "in a variety of mutually incompatible ... ways" (Bilmes, 1988: 161). A range of sources could be cited to illustrate these incompatible interpretations, but reference will be made instead to Levinson's (1983) highly influential account of conversation analysis, because it contains an excellent summary of the differing ways in which preference has been presented. Furthermore, Levinson (1983) merits attention because Schiffrin (1987: 390) calls the work the "most thorough and accessible discussion of [CA] available", and preference organisation is at the core of his chapter on 'Conversational structure'. However, despite the apparently clear and compelling nature of Levinson's (1983) account of CA, his description of preference is not fully coherent. He begins by associating preference with structural markedness (ibid.: 333-336), then with a list of responses to common actions (ibid.: 336-339), and finally with frequency of occurrence (ibid.: 341-345). Although he does not claim that markedness is a criterion of preference, the assumption that he is claiming such a thing is clearly a possible interpretation of his account of the relationship between the two: "[P]referred seconds are unmarked - they occur as structurally simpler turns; in contrast dispreferred seconds are marked by various kinds of structural complexity. Thus dispreferred turns are typically delivered: (a) after some significantdelay; (b) with some preface marking their dispreferredstatus, often the particle well; (c) with some account of why the preferred second cannot be performed." (Levinson, 1983 : 307) Accountability is, of course, an aspect of this description of a dispreferred response, but as Levinson (1983) does not consider accountability in the absence of markedness, its value as a means of describing and explaining preference is necessarily limited. Levinson (1983) uses Atkinson and Drew (1979) as one of his principal sources, but whereas the latter are careful to relate markedness to "the preference organisation for some adjacency pairs", Levinson (1983) adds no such qualification and allows his readers to infer that markedness is a feature of all dispreferred second pair parts. When researchers have been as careful as Atkinson and Drew (1979) and have investigated markedness and preference in those adjacency pairs where the relationship is valid, they have produced work that illustrates how a particular aspect of preference organisation operates (Ahrens, 1997; Greatbatch, 1992; Kotthoff, 1993; Pomerantz, 1984; Seedhouse, 1997). However, even though the relationship between agreement and an unmarked response and disagreement and a marked response is well-established (Pomerantz 1984), there is a danger in assuming such a relationship without examining the situated nature of the interaction, as Taylor (1994) demonstrates. The second most common claim about preference follows from the implied identification of markedness and preference. It enables Levinson (1983: 336) to propose that there is a correlation between certain actions and their appearance in a marked or unmarked format. Hence, because invitations may be accepted in an unmarked

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fashion and rejected in a marked fashion, Levinson (1983) suggests that acceptances are preferred and rejections are dispreferred, and he displays a table showing what are said to be the preferred and dispreferred responses to a range of common actions. This table is particularly important because it appears in many texts on discourse analysis and pragmatics (Chimombo and Roseberry, 1998; Cook, 1989; Mey, 1993; Taylor and Cameron, 1987; Yule, 1996), where it is presented as a reliable representation of preference. The display, however, glosses over the fact that all language is indexical (Garfinkel, 1967: 4-7) and that preference can only be determined in the circumstances in which an action is constituted. Thus, as Coulter (1983: 362-363) points out, there might be a generalised preference in society for agreement, but there are clearly situations where disagreement is preferred, as, for example, in responses to self-deprecations (Pomerantz, 1984: 83-95) or in argument sequences (Kotthoff, 1993). From an ethnomethodological perspective, 'indexicality' refers to the fact that speakers and hearers have to 'work' at contextualizing talk (Atkinson, 1988: 450). As Cuff et al. (1987: 174-175) explain: "For Garfinkel, social settings are not 'out there' and independent of the actions of members at any given moment. Rather, they are to be seen as ongoing accomplishments of the interactional 'work' in which the members of a setting or event are continuouslyengaged. By conceivingof interactional activities as 'work', Garfinkel views the orderliness of settings as both the product and process of members' actions. He is proposing that members have to accomplish or achieve their social world. This accomplishment is practical." Indexical knowledge is therefore jointly constituted by those involved in an interaction, and it is not a substitute for 'world knowledge', 'context-sensitivity', or 'situation'. The third aspect of preference that Levinson (1983: 341-345) presents derives from the suggestion that the preferred action is the most frequently used and the dispreferred the least frequently used, and preference is, in fact, discussed in such terms in the early literature of conversation analysis. In their work on repair, for example, Schegloff et al. ([1977] 1990: 32) observe that "even casual inspection of talk in interaction finds self-correction vastly more common than other-correction". This observation, however, is described as "gross, prima-facie evidence" (ibid.), but that important qualification is missing from Levinson (1983). Instead, the impression is given that some forms of preference are related to markedness and others to frequency of occurrence, without any explanation of what is fundamental to the different aspects of preference. Frequency of occurrence does help to identify preferred and dispreferred actions, but what is more important is the understanding that "... the object of CA is not to account for or to model what participants in particular situations normally do but to account for how what they do provides resources and constraints for other participants." (Bilmes, 1988: 173) The fourth aspect of preference that appears in the literature derives not so much from Levinson (1983) directly as from Heritage (1984), who associates the notion with 'face' and social solidarity (Goffman, 1955; Brown and Levinson, 1987). Heritage (1984: 269) claims that

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"'... preferred format actions are normally affiliative in character while dispreferred format actions are disaffiliative. Similarly, while preferred format actions are generally supportive of social solidarity, dispreferred format actions are destructiveof it." Czyzewski (1989: 53), however, notes that there are two difficulties with the 'face' and social solidarity argument. For one thing, conversation analysis has its roots in ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967; Heritage, 1984; Maynard and Clayman, 1991) and it seeks to discover the methods that individuals use to constitute social actions. It is concerned therefore with how individuals constitute preferred and dispreferred actions, rather than why actions are constituted as preferred or dispreferred. From an ethnomethodological point of view, preferred actions might indeed be described as those that 'do' affiliation, while dispreferred are those that 'do' disaffiliation, but the question of how they do so remains to be answered. The more important point that Czyzewski (1989: 52-53) makes is the following: "[B]oth 'preferred' and 'dispreferred' actions contribute in different ways to social solidarity ... 'preferred' actions confirm the social reality directly, while 'dispreferred' actions indirectly produce the same effect ... [In Goffman's terms] 'preferred' actions relate to 'supportive interchanges' and 'dispreferred' actions to 'remedial interchanges', and that both 'preferred' and 'dispreferreds' are complementary (positive and negative, respectively)forms of interaction ritual." The 'social solidarity' argument is important, however, because it is concerned with relating preference to the achievement of intersubjective understanding, but it is not, as Cameron (1990) argues, an adequate account of preference. It is necessary to ally the issue of why individuals act as they do to the question of how they construct preferred and dispreferred turns in order to fully understand the concept. In the literature, therefore, preference has become associated with markedness, with Levinson's (1983: 336) table of preferred and dispreferred responses, with frequency of occurrence, and with a discussion of 'face' and social solidarity. These are some of "the mutually incompatible, and sometimes methodologically questionable, ways" (Bilmes, 1988: 161) in which preference has been construed. All are aspects of the notion, but none offers a criterion of preference. Although Bilmes' (1988) excellent work identifies the weaknesses of existing accounts of preference, the "clear and unitary concept" that he promises to provide (1988: 161) does not emerge easily from his paper. Instead, his account of preference deals, firstly, with what he calls 'Type U' and 'Type R' preferences, then briefly with noticeable absence and accountability, and finally with the principle of ordering. This principle is a feature of preference organisation in repair (Schegloff et al., [1977] 1990), wherein self-initiated self-repair is constituted as the most preferred form and otherinitiated other-repair is constituted as the least preferred form. The principle of ordering is also evident in the organisation of turn-taking (Sacks et al., 1974), and, as Levinson (1983: 343-345) and Schegloff (1986: 126-129) suggest, in the way in which identifications on the telephone are constituted. The criterion that is implicit in Bilmes (1988), however, is the one that this paper will describe and illustrate: noticeable absence and accountability. It will do so with an advantage that was not available to Bilmes (1988), and that is access to the col-

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lected lectures o f H a r v e y Sacks (1992a,b). The p a p e r will b e g i n b y e x p l a i n i n g h o w n o t i c e a b l e a b s e n c e and a c c o u n t a b i l i t y can clarify the m e a n i n g o f preference, and it will illustrate the criterion at w o r k b y m e a n s o f e x a m p l e s from three important lectures b y Sacks. It will also show that B i l m e s ' (1988) principle o f ordering is s i m p l y the m o s t i m p r e s s i v e manifestation o f preference, rather than the criterion that the researcher needs.

3. Noticeable absence and accountability In conversation analysis, preference is discussed largely in terms o f responses to actions, but preference is as important to initial actions as it is to responses. M o s t o f the actions w e constitute are, in G a r f i n k e l ' s (1967: 44) words, " s e e n but u n n o t i c e d " . W e act and we e x p e r i e n c e the actions o f others, but very m a n y o f these actions go u n n o t i c e d and unremarked. A s J a y y u s i (1991: 242) explains: "If we look at the pair greeting/greeting, for instance, we can see that it is not the case that a greeting will in actuality always elicit a greeting. The formulation here is not one of empirical regularity. Rather, it is that a greeting is expected in return, as a matter of routine practico-moral order. What does it mean to say that a greeting is expected in return? - it means that there is a normative orientation to the propriety of a return greeting, in order to accomplish an encounter as routine, 'normal', 'ordinary', 'as usual', 'unproblematic', etc." This p a p e r contends that it is this ' n o r m a l ' , ' o r d i n a r y ' , or ' s e e n but u n n o t i c e d ' action that is ' p r e f e r r e d ' , b e c a u s e it is one o f a range o f e x p e c t e d actions for w h i c h no account is required. In other words, a first pair part receives a second pair part that matches or c o m p l e t e s it, and that raises no questions about w h y either the first pair part or the s e c o n d pair part was constituted as it was. C o n v e r s e l y , A t k i n s o n and D r e w ( 1 9 7 9 : 5 1 - 5 2 ) note that there are m a n y instances in c o n v e r s a t i o n in which an e x p e c t e d or c o n d i t i o n a l l y relevant response is not forthcoming: "[F]ollowing the production of a first part of a pair, a second part in that pair is a relevant next action on the part of the selected next speaker: and if the utterance in the next speaker's turn is not hearable as a second part in the pair, or if that slot is simply unfilled (i.e. if the selected next speaker does not begin his turn), then it is a noticeable absence." This p a p e r argues that an action w h i c h is n o t i c e a b l y absent, and which therefore has to be a c c o u n t e d for, is the ' d i s p r e f e r r e d ' action. W h a t constitutes an e x p e c t e d action or the absence o f an e x p e c t e d action, h o w e v e r , d e p e n d s on the interactants' indexical k n o w l e d g e in a context that they j o i n t l y create, and the n o t i c e a b l e absence o f an expected, or c o n d i t i o n a l l y relevant, action will be illustrated in a data extract below. The p a p e r will c l a i m that the account that an i n d i v i d u a l p r o v i d e s o f the n o t i c e a b l y absent, or dispreferred, action is o f two types. The first says that while an e x p e c t e d action was n o t i c e a b l y absent, that a b s e n c e can be a c c o u n t e d for in such a w a y that no n e g a t i v e inferences will be d r a w n and that the b e h a v i o u r o f the person r e s p o n s i ble for the d i s p r e f e r r e d action will not be sanctioned. F r o m an i n d i v i d u a l ' s failure to

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offer a greeting, for example, one might infer that the other person was preoccupied, tired, unwell, wearing the wrong glasses, and so forth, and these are acceptable accounts from which no sanctions should follow. In the second type of account, however, the noticeable absence of an expected action gives rise to negative inferences and to sanctions. When another person fails to offer a greeting, one might account for the absence of the greeting by deciding that the action was deliberate, and one might make negative inferences about the other person's character and behaviour. The way in which it is proposed that preference is organised is summarised in Fig. 1. ACTION

PREFERRED

"Seen but unnoticed"

DISPREFERRED

noticeable and accountable, but not sanctionable

noticeable, accountable, and sanctionable

Fig. 1. The structure of preference. The literature not only fails to make this distinction between the two types of dispreferred action, but it tends also to describe and illustrate the second, sanctionable, form, rather than the first. This tendency stems, perhaps, from Levinson's (1983: 333) advice to "try to avoid the dispreferred action", despite the fact that it is clearly impossible, and not necessarily desirable, to avoid actions that are merely noticeable and accountable, but not sanctionable. These are commonplace actions and the example below shows what an obstacle to understanding the term 'dispreferred' is (Bilmes, 1988: 176). The extract is taken from a conversation among a group of English language teachers in a private school in the United Kingdom. They are native speakers of British English and they have been relating amusing errors that their students have made in a written examination. These include " m y back passage to Hamburg" instead of " m y return trip/journey to Hamburg", "a pussy flap" for the device that allows a cat to enter or leave a house when the door is closed, and "to stick two fingers up ' e m ' " to describe a rude, two-fingered gesture. Although a researcher who regularly records their conversation is present, these remarks are made in ignorance of the fact that the conversation is being recorded. The extract, which is taken from Richards (1996), begins at the point where one of the teachers notices that the recorder is working. 1 2 3

Ed: Keith: Harry:

(What is this) Hehe [heh] [He]heheheh

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4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

Keith: Paul: Annette: Keith: Annette: Harry: Paul: Keith: Paul: Annette: Paul: Annette: Keith: Harry: Paul: Keith: Paul: Annette: Keith: Paul: Keith: (Richards

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(That'll be great) (.) [Yeah]. [I'm su]ch a wag. ((General laughter)) Because you forgot to give us our usual w_arning [today heheheheheheheheheheheh]= [Oh sorry oh I'll have to- I'll have to ] forget again. It's been ( ) pretty [good today], [yeah it']s pretty good [Heheheheh] [Hehehe Heh Hahah Heh heheh Yes, I would never have mentioned Trish's black fights had I known. I wouldn't have mentioned (.) pussy flaps. Hhhhhe [heheheheh [Hhhe [hehe [He [heheheheh [That's on now as well= =YEAH absolutely And 'stick my (.) fingers up 'em' Yehah= =I (thought ) 'Back passage to Hamburg' was it? That's it. 'Back passage to ... 1996: 308-310)

The researcher, Keith, is present, therefore, for the purpose of recording talk among the teachers, and he has made recordings on a number of previous occasions. The teachers' expectation, however, is that he will remind them of this purpose before he starts recording, but he forgets to do so at this meeting. On line 1, one of the teachers notices that the tape recorder is working and he interrupts the laughter and joking of others in order to draw their attention to it. On line 7, Annette informs Keith that he has forgotten to remind them that he is recording, and she thereby makes his noticeable failure to perform an expected action accountable. As the conversation began with the teachers exchanging examples of student 'howlers' and showing how much they enjoyed them, this might well have distracted Keith from his professional responsibilities. Instead of offering such an account, however, he simply apologises and implies that the talk has been so entertaining that he should make a point of not reminding them about the recording on future occasions. The fact that the teachers then repeat the comments that they had made when they were unaware of the recording strongly suggests that they are not unhappy with Keith's minor lapse. Thus, although Keith's action is noticeable and accountable, and therefore dispreferred, the subsequent actions of the teachers reveal the fact that they do not treat it as sanctionable. Furthermore, Keith displays his own understanding of the insignificant nature of his failure when he suggests that he might fail to inform them

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when he next wants to make a recording. Although the literature refers largely to preferred and dispreferred responses to the first parts of adjacency pairs, it can be seen that in this case we have absence of the first part of the pair, inform-acknowledge. Other examples in this paper will demonstrate that preference is concerned as much with initial actions as with responses. In order to demonstrate that noticeable absence and accountability is the criterion of preference that is present in Sacks' collected lectures (Sacks, 1992a,b), this paper will examine the three lectures that appear to have the greatest bearing on the discussion of preference. The first lecture, 'This is Mr Smith may I help y o u ? ' (Sacks, 1992a: 1-11), demonstrates Sacks' recognition of the importance of noticeable absence and accountability; the second, 'Everyone has to lie' (Sacks, 1992a: 549-566), shows that preference is constituted in the indexical circumstances of an interaction and that the listing of preferred and dispreferred actions on a table such as Levinson's (1983: 336) is misleading; and the third, 'A defensively designed story' (Sacks, 1992b: 444-457), discusses a dispreferred initial action, rather than a dispreferred response, and it shows that Sacks regarded preference as a technical concept concerned with how actions are constituted, rather than as a psychological notion concerned with why individuals act as they do. 3.1. 'This is Mr Smith may I help you?' This lecture is important and auspicious, partly because it is the very first of Sacks' published lectures (Sacks, 1992a: 1-11), but mainly because it shows how Sacks has to conceive of the idea of noticeable absence and accountability in order to solve a problem. Sacks does not, of course, use the term preference at this initial stage of his study of conversation, but the reader can recognise that the origins of the notion can be traced to analyses such as the one that Sacks performs here. The problem that Sacks was investigating was how early in a telephone call to an emergency psychiatric hospital it was possible to identify those callers who would not want to give their names. His solution was to say that those problematic callers could be the ones who gave a noticeable and accountable (and, therefore, dispreferred) response to an initial greeting and identification. From such a solution, techniques could, of course, be developed for talking to callers of this sort. The lecture begins with Sacks' presentation of three data extracts. These extracts represent two 'seen but unnoticed' exchanges, and one noticeable and accountable exchange. I'll start by giving some quotations: (1) A: B: (2) A: B: (3) A: B:

Hello Hello This is Mr Smith may I help you Yes, this is Mr Brown This is Mr Smith may I help you I can't hear you.

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A: This is Mr Smith. B: Smith. (Sacks, 1992a: 1) Sacks (1992a: 4) inferred from his study of telephone calls that the behaviour of a first speaker constrains the behaviour of a second speaker, and that if the person who speaks first on the telephone proffers a greeting and a name, that person can expect a greeting and a name in return. In the first of Sacks' examples above, a brief greeting (A: Hello) receives an expected brief greeting (B: Hello) in return. This 'seen but unnoticed' greeting exchange is a preferred sequence. Concerted actions of this sort are achievements that we do not notice until a failure to provide an expected response occurs (Schegloff, 1986). It is that very failure that illuminates the existence of a range of expected actions and it is then noticeable that a person is not acting as she should. In the second of Sacks' (1992a: 3) examples above, (2) A: B:

This is Mr Smith may I help you Yes, this is Mr Brown

the achievement of a successful exchange is also 'seen but unnoticed', but it is nevertheless more complex. The first speaker's proffering of a name and a question not only receives a name in return, but it also receives an answer placed contiguously to the question. This contiguous placing of a question and an answer is an example of how speakers collaborate in the constitution of a routine exchange (Sacks, 1987). The third example, however, was the significant one for Sacks, because he identified the noticeable and accountable nature of B's response. (3) A: B: A: B:

This is Mr Smith may I help you I can't hear you. This is Mr Smith. Smith.

B's response is noticeable because, instead of supplying the expected acknowledgement and name in reply to A's identification and question, B claims to be temporarily unable to respond. B accounts for his failure to give an expected response by claiming that he is unable to hear A. Inability to constitute a 'seen but unnoticed' action, rather than reluctance to do so, is a form of behaviour which is noticeable and accountable, but not generally sanctionable (Sacks, 1992b: 152; Levinson, 1983: 356-364). Indexical knowledge, however, tells us that telephone lines which have been clear on innumerable past occasions of use will be clear on the next occasion (Garfinkel, 1967: 94-96). It also tells us that when that line is being used for sensitive purposes, as in the case of calls to an emergency psychiatric hospital, it may occasionally be in the interest of callers to claim an inability to hear in order to disrupt the standard adjacency pair procedure and to avoid giving a name. One reason, in fact, why Sacks (1992b: 7) introduces this data extract is to illustrate the way in which a speaker can 'skip a move' by means of what he calls 'a neat device'.

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Thus, in this sensitive situation, A can infer, as Sacks (1992a: 7) does, that the request from B that he repeat his name is a ploy that B is using in order to avoid giving his own name. It is also often a successful ploy, because the giving of a name is conditionally relevant after a first speaker has given a name, not after a first speaker has answered a question or offered a clarification. What becomes conditionally relevant at that point is an acknowledgment of some sort, or perhaps another question. By using his first turn to state that he cannot hear, the caller has subverted the conditional relevance of the need to supply a name, and has succeeded in moving the conversation on and away from a sensitive issue. It was Sacks' (1992a: 1-11) achievement to give a principled account of what the speakers were doing and to enable us to see that there are conditionally relevant responses to the most mundane actions. Although the literature on accounting practices (Heritage, 1988) deals primarily with the accounts that individuals give of their own actions, the intersubjective nature of talk automatically means that one individual makes inferences about the behaviour of another individual based on accounts that he or she constructs of the other's behaviour. Sacks (1992a: 1-11) did not merely accept that speaker B in the third data extract was having difficulty in hearing what A was saying, but drew on the interpretive procedures of indexicality, the documentary method of interpretation, and the reciprocity of perspectives (Garfinkel, 1967; Heritage, 1984) to provide an account of what B was doing, and Heritage (1988: 139-141 ) acknowledges that individuals provide accounts of the absence of expected actions on the part of others. This lecture does not demonstrate the operation of the concept of preference, but it does reveal its foundations in the earliest of Sacks' investigations, and this is part of the fascination of reading the collected lectures. From noticeable absence and accountability, Sacks and his colleagues were able to conceive of the notions of conditional relevance and preference. This paper suggests that expected actions are 'seen but unnoticed' and therefore preferred, and what Sacks (1992a: 549-566) demonstrates in the second lecture to be discussed, 'Everyone has to lie', is that preferred and dispreferred actions are constituted in the indexical circumstances of their performance, and are not given in advance. 3.2. 'Everyone has to lie'

To show how very similar actions can be constituted as preferred at one moment and as dispreferred at another, Sacks (1992a: 566) chose the example of an action that obliges us all to tell lies from time to time, and that action involves our response to the utterance, 'How are y o u ? ' . Sacks (1992a: 559-560) explains how the telling of a lie occurs: "What the notion of 'lying' involved was that there were two steps, one of which I called 'monitoring', which consisted of finding the subset, and the second, which involved picking a term from that subset. What 'lying' involved was picking a term excluded by that monitoring operation. The monitoring operation gave you a subset and thereby gave you a set of available terms, and since the subsets are mutually exclusive, it also gave you a set of excluded terms. And you 'lied' when you picked an excluded term." In response to a greeting, therefore, the individual monitors her condition in order to determine how she feels. If the monitoring reveals a positive condition, she selects

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the positive subset and from it she takes a term such as ' F i n e ' or 'Great'. If, on the other hand, the monitoring reveals a negative condition, she turns to the negative subset and selects a term such as 'Terrible'. There is also a neutral subset which permits the use o f responses such as ' O . K ' . and 'All right'. However, even when monitoring reveals a negative condition, individuals m a y choose terms from the positive subset, and, if they do so, they lie. "If you stand around, say, in a hospital, you'll perfectly well find people who look like they're just about to die - and may be just about to die - will be sitting, say, in a wheelchair in the hall or in the dayroom, their doctor comes up to them, says, 'How are you?' and they say 'Fine'." (Sacks, 1992: 562) Individuals not only monitor their o w n states before responding, but they also monitor the indexical circumstances o f the question in order to determine whether they should choose an answer from the positive subset or from the negative subset. A doctor is a person to w h o m a response from the negative subset m a y be given, but only if she belongs to the category of 'professionally interested physician' at the m o m e n t she asks the question. If she belongs to the category o f 'physician hurrying to lunch' or to a meeting, the recipient of the greeting should perhaps choose a response from the positive category and lie (Sacks, 1992a: 562). In a later elaboration of this analysis, Sacks (1975: 73) explains that, in trying to determine what sort o f response is appropriate to ' H o w are y o u ? ' , "... the system of regulations involves not a potential asker's determination of whether he could handle any information but, instead, an answerer's determination of whether a given asker can receive the particular information or handle it now. That is, it is the business of one who is asked How are you? to determine whether the asker can handle that information, and to control his answer by reference to that determination. If such information as is not giveable to the asker obtains and occasions that the monitoring product is [negative], then the procedure for not getting into the diagnostic sequence is: Do not offer such an answer as generates the diagnostic sequence. Answer, e.g., O.K. or Fine." There is no mention of preference in this lecture (Sacks, 1992a: 5 4 9 - 5 6 6 ) or in the later article (Sacks, 1975), but the reader can see, as Coupland et al. (1992) confirm, that the system that Sacks refers to above determines the use o f preferred and dispreferred responses, and that his analysis describes the indexical nature o f the system. Thus, the production o f a preferred response requires careful monitoring on the part of the person who receives the greeting or the 'greeting substitute' (Sacks, 1992a: 555), because she recognises that she m a y be held accountable for the consequences o f her action. A preferred response is not noticeable, accountable or sanctionable, but a dispreferred response, depending on its nature, m a y be sanctioned. One can imagine, for example, a sick person in a wheelchair who might give a positive response to a doctor's greeting if she calculates that it is the expected, 'seen but unnoticed' response at that moment. However, people frequently miscalculate the indexical particulars o f such questions and they tell a lie at a time when the truth is the expected answer. If the lie is later revealed, the person will be seen to have given a response to doctors, family members, or friends that is now noticeable, accountable and sanctionable. This is the kind of action which gives rise to justifiable annoyance and to questions such as, ' W h y didn't you tell m e ? '

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As evidence of the routine nature and acceptability of this practice of lying in response to questions about how we are, we can turn to one of Garfinkel's (1967) breaching experiments. The purpose of the experiments was to breach standard expectations in order to show that routine behaviour is an achievement (Schegloff, 1986), and in order to reveal the 'ethno' methods, or interpretive procedures, that constitute that achievement. In this particular case, Garfinkel (1967: 44) instructed his experimenters to seek clarification of any utterance addressed to them. In effect, this involved, in part, their monitoring their own states when receiving, for example, a greeting or a greeting substitute, but suspending the practice of monitoring the sort of information that the first speaker was eligible to receive (Heritage, 1987: 234-235), as the following example shows: (4) The victim waved his hand cheerily. (S) How are you? (E) How am I in regard to what? My health, my finances, my school work, my peace of mind, my ...? (S) (Red in the face and suddenly out of control.) Look! I was just trying to be polite. Frankly, I don't give a damn how you are. (Garfinkel, 1967: 44) After S's question, E should produce an expected, or conditionally relevant, response. Such a response, however, is not forthcoming and we can see instead that E's deviant response to S's greeting has flouted the system of preference that organises the way an utterance such as 'How are you?' is made and responded to. This failure of intersubjective understanding on the part of E is met by what, in Czyzewski's (1989: 53) terms, would be a remedial response from S designed to show E how his action had affected S. The reciprocal rudeness of S in his second turn demonstrates very forcibly that the expected, 'seen but unnoticed' response to his question is noticeably absent, accountable and sanctionable. S's reciprocal rudeness is also noticeable and accountable, but perhaps less obviously sanctionable, because it is an attempt by S to remind E of the threat that his action poses to the delicate "architecture of intersubjectivity" (Heritage, 1984: 70). Unlike the experimenter in the example above, most individuals examine the indexical circumstances of a question such as 'How are you?' and try to adopt the perspective of the questioner before deciding how to answer it (Schtitz, 1962: 11-13). The purpose, of course, is to attempt to see what would constitute a 'seen but unnoticed' response and what would promote intersubjective understanding. Thus, the sick person in the hospital would almost certainly prefer, in the ordinary sense of the word, to tell someone that she is in pain, that she is afraid, or that she is lonely, but she monitors the circumstances of the 'How are you?' carefully in order to determine the preferred and dispreferred responses. The preferred response with a concerned physician or with a sympathetic nurse might well be to unburden herself and to speak honestly, but with a tired doctor or nurse at the end of a long shift it might well be to lie, and the response displayed by the doctor or nurse will suggest whether her decision was the correct one.

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Sacks' discussion of 'Everyone has to lie' provides a prototypical example of preference at work. ' H o w are y o u ? ' is a question that most individuals encounter on a daily basis and it is one that obliges us to determine, in each case, what the 'seen but unnoticed' response is, because this is something that cannot safely be read from a table of preferred and dispreferred responses. Furthermore, the response to ' H o w are y o u ? ' is also a complex example, because while we may imitate Garfinkel's experimenter and provide a 'truthful' form of dispreferred response, the 'lying' response can also, in some cases, be a dispreferred response. It may be dispreferred in the sense that it may not immediately be recognised as such, and it may lead to serious recriminations of the sort, ' W h y didn't you tell me you were in trouble?' or ' W h y didn't you tell me about the pain?' In deciding how to respond, therefore, an individual has to try to recognise what an action is designed to achieve. Is the doctor's ' H o w are y o u ? ' a reflex action, a mere recognition of a person's presence, an expression of interest that cannot be satisfied at that moment, a request for information, or something else? Throughout Sacks' (1992a: 549-566) discussion of 'Everyone has to lie', one is reminded of how close the everyday meaning of 'preference', i.e. that a person acts in a certain way because of a personal preference, comes to the technical meaning of the concept, i.e. that she orients to the requirement to perform an expected, 'seen but unnoticed' action, and of how unfortunate it is that Sacks chose this word to describe a mechanism in conversation analysis (Bilmes, 1988: 176). However, in the third lecture to be discussed, 'A defensively designed story', Sacks (1992b: 453-457) distinguishes most clearly between the mundane use of the term 'preferred' and its technical use in conversation analysis. The lecture is also important because the literature talks largely of preferred and dispreferred responses to actions, rather than of the initial actions that are constituted as preferred or dispreferred. In the 'defensively designed' story, however, Sacks discusses the efforts of a teenager called Louise to show that an action of hers should be seen as dispreferred in the first meaning that this paper gives to the concept, i.e. that it is noticeable and accountable, but not sanctionable. She makes this effort because her action can readily be seen as dispreferred in the second meaning, i.e. as behaviour that is noticeable, accountable and sanctionable.

3.3. 'A "defensively designed" story' This is the story of a young woman who defends herself against possible negative inferences by explaining that she behaved in a dispreferred manner only after trying and failing to act in a preferred manner. Thus, she argues that her behaviour was not the result of a disregard for the preferred choice, but rather of an inability to comply with it. In doing so, she acknowledges that her behaviour was noticeable and accountable, but she suggests that it was not sanctionable. Sacks' discussion of the young w o m a n ' s behaviour centres on the following data extract: (5) Louise: One night- (1.0) I was with this guy that I liked a real lot. An uh (3.0) we had come back from the show, we had gone to the (1.0) Ash Grove

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for a while, 'n we were gonna park. A n ' I c a n ' t stand a car. 'n h e / / h a s a small car. Ken: M m hm Louise: So we walked to the back, an' we just w e n ' into the back house an' we stayed there half the night. (1.0) We didn't go to bed to- t'each other, but- it was so comfortable an' s o / / n i c e . Ken: M m hm, Ken: Mh Louise: Y ' k n o w ? There's everything perfect. (Sacks, 1992b: 453) Sacks (1992b: 456) points out that this story is told by one unmarried teenager to another. As the two are also members of the same therapy group, they might appear to have a great deal in c o m m o n . Sacks (1992b: 4 5 3 - 4 5 4 ) argues, however, that because the story is told by a teenaged girl to a teenaged boy, and because of certain other facts, it is defensive in design and it is defensive for the following reasons: " B y virtue of that he is male, a way that he has, that she can know of, of reading the story that she tells, is in terms o f it possibly telling him the terms o f her availability; a thing that he could be interested in on his own, or, insofar as he has male acquaintances, then the terms of her availability can be used by him to advertise her." (Sacks, 1992b: 453--454) The fact that Louise tells Ken the story could make her vulnerable to undesirable thoughts or actions. This leads her to produce certain defensively designed elements, such as her formulation of the man she was with as 'this guy I liked a real lot', which, according to Sacks (1992b: 453), informs Ken that she is definitely not available to just anyone. Another defensive element is the information that she went back to the house only after considering the idea of parking, but then rejecting it on the grounds of comfort and practicality. Along with countless other American teenagers of her time, parking would have been a 'seen but unnoticed' activity in a way that it would not have been for a much older couple. As Sacks (1992b: 455) explains: "Such a story as, 'One night I went out with a guy I liked a lot and we went to the movies and after the movie we parked and eventually we went home' is no story for such as they. Though it perfectly well might be a story if she was 12 years old, or if she was considerably older than she is, in which case it might be 'doing something like unmarried teenagers'. After all, for a married couple or unmarried adults or varieties of other combinations, this same positioning would not be specifically 'normal'. The sex only has its normal positioning vis-a-vis that they are unmarried teenagers." The fact, however, that parking was a preferred, 'seen but unnoticed' activity does not mean that it was an uncomplicated activity, because, as Erica Jong remembers, the lives o f teenaged couples in the nineteen-fifties were very carefully calculated. "... and we did have rules in 1955! Outside or inside the bra, outside or inside the panties, inside or outside the jockey shorts. If rhymed poetry is tennis with a net (to paraphrase Robert Frost), then "making

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out" in 1955 was a tournament with its own elaborate rules. One false move and you could be out.'" (Jong, 1995: 141) In order to avoid the risk of being out, it is important for Louise to make it clear to her fellow teenager that she is a normal, unmarried y o u n g w o m a n for w h o m "... parking is preferred. ! don't mean it's favourite, but there's some way it's preferred over the back house, if at least only in moral terms. That is to say, she brings off that she prefers the back house, but there is a more abstract sense of 'prefer' which involves her in invoking the parking - that which is 'preferred' in the more abstract sense - as a first alternative." (Sacks, 1992b: 456) The back house is clearly preferred to the car in the non-technical sense that Louise finds it more comfortable and would sooner be there, but parking is 'preferred' in the technical sense as something that unmarried teenagers could do without their behaviour being noticeable, without having to account for their behaviour, and without provoking sanctions from their peers. As Louise wishes to be viewed as a normal teenaged girl, she pointedly inserts the information that her 'preference', in the technical sense, was to park, but that her boyfriend's car was too small for comfort. It has already been noted that inability to perform a preferred action is an account that is not generally sanctioned (Sacks, 1992b: 152; Levinson, 1983: 357-364). Having made the dispreferred (i.e. noticeable and accountable) choice o f returning to the house rather than parking, she seeks to pre-empt any suggestion o f further dispreferred (and possibly sanctionable) choices by stating that they spent only half the night in the house and that they did not go to bed. As Sacks (1992b: 457) observes: "presumably what she didn't do is something that she figures she needs to say, by virtue of the question now arising: 'Okay, if she would do that, what else would she do?' So that in proposing that she did something she knows is unusual - and she knows it's unusual by virtue of her commitment to the normal preferences - she then engages in bounding it as to what she didn't do." Louise has described how she returned to the house late at night with her boyfriend, and, for Ken, that action was noticeable, accountable, and possibly sanctionable. K n o w i n g this, Louise designs her account to forestall the negative inferences and unwelcome actions that might otherwise be part of that sanction. An important part of that account involves acknowledging the existence of preferred and disprefen'ed actions, and claiming that she would have performed the preferred action had it been possible. In doing this, she tries to suggest that her part in a dispreferred action was an exceptional departure from the norm, rather than one example o f a possibly interesting and exploitable collection of departures, and that it should not be sanctioned. Sacks' (1992a: 5 4 9 - 5 6 6 ) discussion o f Louise's account of her actions demonstrates that the scope o f preference is very m u c h greater than the reader of Levinson (1983) could imagine. Far from being concerned only with the responses to a small number of actions such as inviting, requesting or blaming, preference is a feature of the constitution of all actions. To conclude this discussion o f preference, it is necessary to refer once again to Bilmes' ( 1 9 8 8 : 1 6 3 ) principle o f ordering, which he considers to be one of the " t w o

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aspects to Sacks's notion of preference", and to show how that principle can be subsumed under the criterion of noticeable absence and accountability, which Bilmes (1988: 164) sees as the other aspect of the notion of preference. The principle of ordering, as it operates in repair (Schegloff et al., [1977] 1990), shows that the socalled 'preferred' form of repair is self-initiated self-repair, followed by other-initiated self-repair, and then by other-initiated other-repair. A self-initiated self-repair such as (6): (6) N: She was givin me a:ll the people that were go:one this year ! mean this quarter y ' / / k n o w (Schegloff et al., 1990: 34) is called the preferred form, despite the fact that the error is noticeable and accountable. It would perhaps be more accurate to call this form of repair the least dispreferred action, because the utterance is being remedied as a result of the speaker's having noticed what is wrong with it. However, it is called 'preferred' because there is an expectation that, following an error, speakers will employ a reciprocity of perspectives and recognise that allowing one another to repair their own mistakes can contribute to intersubjective understanding. Conversely, the intervention of another speaker with a repair before the first speaker has been able to initiate self-repair would be noticeable and accountable, and possibly sanctionable. It would highlight the absence of the first speaker's opportunity for self-repair. The same would be true if the third form of repair, other-initiated other-repair, were to occur before the second form, other-initiated self-repair. The research of Schegloff et al. ([1977] 1990) has identified an order in which actions should be performed, and any change to that order is noticeable and accountable, and possibly sanctionable. The principle of ordering, therefore, is a delicate manifestation of preference organisation and the challenge for researchers is to identify its operation in other forms of interaction. Such a revelation would add considerable richness and interest to the notion of preference, but it would not displace noticeable absence and accountability as the criterion.

4. Conclusion A decade ago, Bilmes (1988: 162) and Toolan (1989: 263) asserted the importance of the concept of preference in conversation analysis. Today, however, it is not only difficult to find much research in which preference plays a significant role, but the concept is not mentioned in one recent introduction to conversation analysis (Psathas, 1995) and not employed in the data analysis in another (Hutchby and Wooffitt, 1998). Bilmes (1988) identified the problems that researchers encountered in understanding and employing the notion of preference, but his own criterion has not been adopted and those who make use of the notion continue to be guided by Levinson (1983). With the publication of Sacks' (1992a,b) collected lectures, it is now possible to understand what Sacks (1987: 54) meant when he referred to mechanisms such as preference as 'very simple things'.

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Preference organisation, if it is understood as being based on noticeable absence and accountability, is indeed one of those very simple mechanisms. The description of preference in this paper shows that preferred actions are 'seen but unnoticed' while dispreferred actions are of two kinds: one is simply noticeable and accountable while the other is noticeable, accountable and sanctionable. The establishment of this distinction between dispreferred actions can help to counter both the negative associations of the term 'dispreferred' and Levinson's (1983: 333) advice to "try to avoid the dispreferred action". More importantly, perhaps, it can help to lessen the danger that ten Have (1999:41) warns of when he says that some CA practitioners might be "tempted to 'apply' the established concepts in a mechanistic fashion, as 'coding instruments' ". He notes that "... the concept of 'preference', for instance, as developed by Sacks (1987) and elaborated by Pomerantz (1984) and others, has been codified in schemes like those of Levinson (1983: 332-345) or Heritage (1984: 265-280) which may seem to suggest such a 'mechanistic' treatment. In other words, the temptation is to use CA's previously established concepts and findings as law-like or even ~causal' rules, whereas one should, I would maintain, see them as descriptions of possible normative orientations of participants, available for various uses as they see fit." (ten Have, 1999: 41)

This paper has argued that markedness and frequency of occurrence are aspects of preference organisation, but that the concept can only be adequately understood in terms of normative accountability and its role in achieving intersubjective understanding. It has attempted to explain and illustrate Garfinkel's (1967) proposal that individuals construct social order indexically or 'from within' (Cuff et al., 1987: 173), and to show that individuals determine whether an action is preferred or dispreferred through their knowledge of the local details of the constitution of the action.

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Ronald Boyle is a lecturer in the Department of English at Chulalongkorn University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Aston in Birmingham.