Adjacency Pairs

Adjacency Pairs

In pragmatics, a branch of linguistics, an adjacency pair is an example of conversational turn-taking. An adjacency pair is composed of two utterances by two speakers, one after the other. The speaking of the first utterance (the first-pair part, or the first turn) provokes a responding utterance (the second-pair part, or the second turn).

For example, a question such as "What's your name?" requires the addressee to provide an answer in the following turn, thus completing the adjacency pair. A satisfactory response could be "I'm James". To provide an irrelevant response, or to fail to complete the pair, is noticed as a breach of conversational maxim. A reply like "I'm allergic to shellfish" would not satisfy the adjacency pair, as it violates Grice's conversational maxim of relevance.