A Scalar View of Response Relevance.

The article presents the authors' response to a commentary by Emanuel A. Schegloff and Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen on their article "Mobilizing Response" published in the current issue of the journal. They say that conversation analysis (CA) research supports a theory of communication that fundamental structures of social interaction are robust across gender, class, and culture. They say that Schegloff proposes as candidate structures, turntaking, repair organization, and sequence organization a challenge arises from the fact that not every contribution to a conversation makes response conditionally relevant. They says that the first hypothesis suggested by Schegloff and Couper-Kuhlen regarding nonfocused talk relies on a dichotomy of states of conversation.