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Contingency and action: a comparison of two forms of requesting
*
Dr. Traci S. Curl
Department of Language and Linguistic Science
University of York, Heslington, York YO10 5DD
01904 43 3611
tsc3@york.ac.uk
Prof Paul Drew
Department of Sociology
University of York, Heslington, York YO10 5DD
01904 43 3056
wpd1@york.ac.uk
* This is a report of research undertaken as part of the project Affiliation
and disaffiliation in interaction: Language and social cohesion, funded by the
British ESRC (grant number RES-00023-0035). Under the terms of a European
Science Foundation initiative, the ESRC – whose support is gratefully
acknowledged – funded the British part of a 5-nation study co-ordinated by Anna
Lindström (University of Uppsala, Sweden).
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Title: Contingency and action: a comparison of two forms of requesting
Running head: Two forms of requesting
Keywords: requests, conversation, syntactic forms, institutional talk,
entitlement, contingency
11,020 words
Abstract
This paper explores 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, while 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 organisations, where
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.
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1. Introduction
Making a request, be it for an object, assistance or information, is a
basic and ubiquitous activity in human interaction. Moreover, it is widely
acknowledged in the literature that a special sensitivity may be associated with
requesting, because it imposes in some fashion on the recipient (e.g., Brown &
Levinson 1987). Requesting may be accomplished through a variety of linguistic
forms, including (in English) simply naming the object being requested (e.g.,
Twenty Marlborough), imperatives such as Pass me the x, declaratives such as I
need x (you to do x), through to such forms as Would you mind passing me the x,
Could you do x, and Are you using the x? In this paper we report the findings of
an investigation into the different linguistic (lexico-syntactic) forms used to
request – and specifically the two forms that we found to be most frequently
occurring in our data corpora ranging from ordinary (ie. social, family etc.)
interactions (telephone and face-to-face) to emergency calls (out-of-hours calls
to the doctor, and emergency calls to the police). These two forms were the
interrogative with modal verbs Would/could you do X? and a declarative form in
which the modal is prefaced by I was wondering if (I was wondering if you/I
could do x).
The principal findings of our report concern speakers’ selections between
these two forms, selections that reflect their orientations to their entitlement
to make the request, and to the contingencies which may be involved in the
recipient granting the request. Since these findings differ, in a number of
respects, from those reported in the literature to date, it will be worth
beginning by reviewing what have been the most salient themes in the research
literature on requesting.
This literature has, in one way or another, focused largely on the
relative directness with which requests are made, or constructed. For instance,
some of the earlier forms illustrated above, such as naming an object,
imperatives and I need you to.., seem direct; whereas forms such as I was
wondering if.. and Are you using the x might be considered rather indirect ways
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of asking for something. Given the association between requesting and imposing
on a recipient, and also the interest (especially in the conversation analytic
literature) on managing actions so as to avoid dispreferred responses, in this
case the rejection of a request (eg. Schegloff 1987a), the literature has
focused particularly on indirect forms, or the indirectness with which speakers
manage request sequences. There are perhaps three research
traditions/perspectives that have most conspicuously explored the indirectness
of request forms.
Given the supposed indirectness of the relation between, on the one hand,
the surface form and literal meaning of some utterances, and on the other hand
their illocutionary force (as it is generally termed: Austin 1962, Searle 1975)
as requesting, one theme in the literature has been the inferencing rules by
which recipients understand the request which is embedded in or communicated
through an utterance. At the most general level, it was, after all, Grice’s
objective to show how saying one thing could entail communicating another,
through the operation of certain general principles of conversation (Grice
1975). More specifically about requesting, Searle’s object of enquiry was how “a
speaker may utter a sentence and mean what he says and also mean another
illocution with a different propositional content. For example, a speaker may
utter the sentence Can you reach the salt? and mean it not merely as a question
but as a request to pass the salt.” (Searle 1975: 59/60). His answer was that
each type of illocutionary act has a set of conditions – ‘felicity conditions’ –
which are necessary for the performance of the act; by which Searle meant, the
appropriate or correct understanding of the action which was ‘intended’ by a
form of words. Hence the literature on indirect speech acts is concerned to
formulate the conditions (inferencing rules) that need to be met in constructing
an utterance, to enable the inference to be made that the speaker is requesting.
This has been developed in subsequent studies of the processes through which
indirect request forms are understood (eg. Clark 1979, Clark and Schunk 1980;
Francik and Clark 1985; Gibbs 2002). However, the focus on inferencing rules and
processes provides little information about how and why speakers select a