Summary Concepts & Terms: Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis

Concepts & Terms: Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis Adjacency Pairs 1. Adjacency Pairs within English Linguistics The adjacency pair theory has its roots in the development of Conversation Analysis, a research approach that began to take shape in the late 1960s and gained prominence throughout the 1970s. Conversation Analysis focuses on studying the structure of spoken interaction to examine how people use language to create meaning. 2. Definition & structure Adjacency pairs are pairs of sentences that happen one after the other in a conversation, where the first sentence makes us expect a certain kind of reply within the second sentence e.g. a question in the first sentence naturally leads into an answer within the second sentence.