ABSTRACT
As mentioned in Chapters 1 and 3, in the 1980s, Garfinkel et al. (1982) worked on a research project on “kids’ culture” which aimed to investigate and render visible children’s interactive competences. On the basis of a small number of cases, the author remarked that young children (around 2-and-a-half years of age) may already use the adjacency pair organization as a resource for coordinating their own activities with those of others, and seem to orient toward the central property of adjacency pairs: conditional relevance:
Preliminary investigations of our corpus of tapes, indeed shows that for somewhat older children, about two and a half, the conditional relevance of utterances is realized and that adjacency organization is already utilized for what appears to be a significant number of interactions, that is, at least extensively. But, the number of cases in our own corpus upon which these and other observations like them might depend is relatively small. (Garfinkel et al. 1982: 49)
