Question-declaration coupling in a university meeting talk: Discourse of social inequality and collegiality

Conversation Analysis (CA) deals with the description of microscopic and corpus-driven data in an ‘unmotivating looking’ analytical fashion. As long as there are new, interesting, or deviant features from data, they always worthy a micro analysis. For this paper, we report ‘question-declaration coupling’ meeting talks new feature explicate it through discourse social inequality collegiality academe. The came total five recorded meetings three departments, such Education, Arts Science, Social Work, private university Manila, Philippines. lasted for hours 50 minutes. From adjacency pairs question-answer, sequential pattern shows that questions deserve conspicuous answers subordinates, but Chair automatically couples them declarative sentences other utterances serve continuers. is categorised strategic turn-suppressing mechanism to hold back members possibly challenging existing policies institution. It also seen deprive extending litanies possible counter-arguments. positive perspective, argue air people able know their boundaries ongoing interaction. Toward end, state implications results teaching learning socio-pragmalinguistics. We recommend future cross-linguistic comparisons these under study, considering small corpus study.