ABSTRACT
In conversation analysis, the term (introduced by Schegloff) characterizes participants’ expectations with regard to the sequential organization of turns in conversations. The production of a token of an utterance type A establishes the expectation (or relevance) of a token of a particular type B by the next speaker. If B fails to occur, its absence will be noticed; for example, A may be repeated until B is provided. A and B may be parts of an adjacency pair or may be sequences as in mutual greetings (A) and the first topic (B).
