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Date: 2015-10-07; view: 349.

harvey sacks: Lectures on Conversation. Volume i. Blackwell 1992, pages 3-4

I'll start off by giving some quotations.

(1) A: Hello.
B: Hello.

(2) A: This is Mr Smith may I help you.
B: Yes, this is Mr Brown.

108 READINGS

READINGS 109

(3) A: This is Mr Smith may I help you. B: I can't hear you. A: This is Mr Smith. B: Smith.

These are some first exchanges in telephone conversations col­lected at an emergency psychiatric hospital. They are occurring between persons who haven't talked to each other before. One of them, A, is a staff member of this psychiatric hospital. B can be either somebody calling about themselves, that is to say in trouble in one way or another, or somebody calling about somebody else.

I have a large collection of these conversations, and I got started looking at these first exchanges as follows. A series of persons who called this place would not give their names. The hospital's concern was, can anything be done about it? One question I wanted to address was, where in the course of the conversation could you tell that somebody would not give their name? So I began to look at the materials. It was in fact on the basis of that question that I began to try to deal in detail with conversations.

I found something that struck me as fairly interesting quite early. And that was that if the staff member used 'This is Mr Smith may I help you' as their opening line, then overwhelmingly, any answer other than 'Yes, this is Mr Brown' (for example, 'I can't hear you,' 'I don't know,' 'How do you spell your name?') meant that you would have serious trouble getting the caller's name, if you got the name at all....

Looking at the first exchange compared to the second, we can be struck by two things. First of all, there seems to be a fit between what the first person who speaks uses as their greeting, and what the person who is given that greeting returns. So that if A says, 'Hello,' then B tends to say 'Hello.' If A says 'This is Mr Smith may I help you,' B tends to say 'Yes, this is Mr Brown.' We can say there's a procedural rule there, that a person who speaks first in a telephone conversation can choose their form of address, and in choosing their form of address they can thereby choose the form of address the other uses.

I> Do you think that the 'procedural rule' presented here applies to all 'first exchanges' in telephone conversations?

t> Can you describe this 'procedural rule' in terms of preference

structure (as outlined in Chapter 8, pages -78-82) by including example (3) in your analysis?

[> What advantages and disadvantages do you think there are in using telephone data as the basis for analyzing how conversa­tion works?