While early work on variation across pluricentric languages, such as English, concentrated primarily on differences in accents and grammar (including both syntactic and lexical variation), there has been an increasing amount of work devoted to discourse and pragmatic variation across Englishes. Most of this work has nevertheless focused on variation in forms, such as discourse markers (or related notions, including discourse particles, pragmatic markers etc.), speech act formats and politeness routines (Aijmer and Rühlemann 2015; Barron 2017; Pichler 2016; Schneider and Barron 2008), or what Leech (1983) originally termed pragmalinguistic variation. There have been moves in recent years, however, to widen the scope to consider sociopragmatic variation across Englishes (e.g. Haugh and Schneider 2012), including the sequential architecture of conversational interaction.
One key question for studies focusing on sociopragmatic variation, however, is how we might best theorise putative similarities and differences in the interactional sequences by which we accomplish social actions. In this paper, I consider whether the conversation analytic notion of preference (Pillet-Shore 2017; Pomerantz 1984; Pomerantz and Heritage 2013; Sacks 1992; Schegloff, Jefferson and Sacks 1977) may be of potential use here. I begin by briefly outlining what is meant by preference. I then briefly summarising findings from an ongoing project on initial interactions in which speakers of different varieties of English (Australian, American, British) are getting acquainted (Flint, Haugh and Merrison 2019; Haugh and Carbaugh 2015; Haugh 2015, 2017; Haugh and Weinglass 2018). These findings are used as a springboard to consider the extent to which preference principles may be culturally shaped, at least in the case of initial interactions. I conclude by cautioning that claims about putative preferences need to be tested with much larger datasets than we currently have ready access to, and that this provides yet another reason why we should continue to engage in efforts to pool and share language data in Australia.