Turn-taking is concerned with exploring the (largely orderly) transition from one speaker to the next in naturally occurring speech (Levinson, 1983: 297) – that is, how turns are taken, managed and combined to form sequences by interlocutors in spoken interactions. Studies of turn-taking address the issue of how ‘the utterances in question conform or depart from the expectations that are attached to the ‘slots’ in which they occur’ (ibid.: 12). Two types of expectations, or constraints, are pertinent here: one is that the expectations of the utterance in question are established by the immediately preceding turn (to form ‘adjacency pairs’, such as a question being followed by an answer); the second relates to the evident, conventionalized assumptions attached to the wider social context in which the turn occurs, and the social identities of those who perform the social actions (ibid.). The notion of preference (Pomerantz, 1984) is critical to an understanding of turn-taking and the degree to which utterances conform to or depart from the expected constraints of the discourse. A preferred response is one which is structurally expected (such as a greeting following a greeting), and is therefore direct and to the point, whereas a dispreferred response is marked in terms of its more complex structure – for instance, by hedges, pauses and accounts. Rejecting an offer would usually be a dispreferred response (but see Kotthoff, 1993, Handford and Koester, 2010, and below).