Emanuel A. Schegloff: "On an Actual Virtual 
Servo-Mechanism for Guessing Bad News: A Single 
Case Conjecture." Social Problems, 35(1988):442-457.

A conversation analytic treatment of a single
episode of talk-in-interaction is used to sketch 
a mechanism for steering recipients of bad news 
to better guesses of what the news is. The account
of the mechanism makes use of the notion of 
"preferred/dispreferred response" and 
distinguishes different usages of that notion. 
The results of the exploration are used to 
recommend an approach & specialized contexts in 
which bad news is communicated, as well as an
approach to "specialized" talk more generally.