"Muss leider absagen. Muss noch nen referat fertig machen." – Zur Dialogizität von Absagen und Verabredungsablehnungen in der SMS-Kommunikation

Abstract

Short messages are used widely for the micro-coordination of appointments and meetings among friends – which also entails managing cancellations in writing. Based on a corpus of 63 text message dialogues, the paper sets out to describe different patterns: Rejections of invitations ("Verabredungsablehnungen") are distinguishable from cancellations of pre-confirmed appointments ("Absagen") in their turn-internal composition. Following a dialogic approach to text messaging, the author also discusses if and in how far the conversation-analytic notion of "preference" can be applied to quasi-synchronous written dialogues. It is argued that rejections of invitations show certain features of dispreference (e.g. delay, hedging, good news exits); cancellations of pre-confirmed appointments, however, lack some of these features, as the point of reference (i.e. the day and time of the appointment) has to be re-established first.