How to Do Things With Words

Discourse and Social Psychology

Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology

In this article, we explore the syntactic forms speakers use when making requests. An initial investigation of ordinary telephone calls between family and friends and out-of-hours calls to the doctor showed a difference in the distribution of modal verbs (e.g., Can you …), and requests prefaced by I wonder if. Modals are most common in ordinary conversation, whereas I wonder if … is most frequent in requests made to the doctor. This distributional difference seemed to be supported by calls from private homes to service organizations in which speakers also formatted requests as I wonder if. Further investigation of these and other corpora suggests that this distributional pattern is related not so much with the sociolinguistic speech setting but rather with speakers' orientations to known or anticipated contingencies associated with their request. The request forms speakers select embody, or display, their understandings of the contingencies associated with the recipient's ability to grant the request.

/pdf/contingency-and-action-a-comparison-of-two-forms-of-3352hypaki.pdf

Contingency and Action: A Comparison of Two Forms of Requesting

Someone's “deontic authority” is their right to determine others' future actions. It can be acquiesced to or resisted. This article introduces, more systematically than before, the concept to close examination of talk-in-interaction. Drawing on video recordings of planning meetings as data and on conversation analysis as a method, we examine two classes of utterances: (a) first speakers' suggestions for future events and (b) second speakers' responses, which, besides acquiescing to or resisting these plans, also acquiesce to or resist the first speakers' rights to make them. Where the second speakers align with the deontic rights allocated to them by the first speakers, we call this “deontic congruence.” “Deontic incongruence,” on the other hand, is where the second speaker resists the suggested distribution of deontic rights. These are far-reaching claims in social life, and we show how they are displayed in the organization of talk.

Deontic Authority in Interaction: The Right to Announce, Propose, and Decide

Offers of assistance: Constraints on syntactic design

Repetition and the prosody–pragmatics interface

Conversation analysis (CA) is founded on a sociological conceptualization of 
the basically social nature of language use in human interaction. However as 
the work in CA has developed, it has come to be a truly multi-disciplinary 
ﬁ eld; and in this account of recent developments and the directions in which 
we see CA heading, we will highlight particularly the implications which 
CA’s methods and ﬁ ndings are having for core areas in linguistics – focusing 
especially on the syntax of social actions in talk. But to begin with, we will 
brieﬂ y review the background to CA’s programme.

Traci S. Curl

Papers

Contingency and Action: A Comparison of Two Forms of Requesting

Offers of assistance: Constraints on syntactic design

Repetition and the prosody–pragmatics interface

Conversation analysis: Overview and new directions