How does a parent get a child to do something? And, indeed, how might the child avoid complying or seem to comply without actually having done so? This article uses conversation analysis to identify the interactionally preferred and dispreferred response to directives (compliance and resistance respectively). It then focuses on one alternative response option that has both verbal and embodied elements. The first part involves an embodied display of incipient compliance. That is, actions that are preparatory steps towards compliance and signal that it may be forthcoming, but which do not in themselves constitute compliance. Incipient compliance creates sequential space for a verbal turn that reformulates the ongoing action as autonomous, self-motivated behaviour on the recipient's part, rather than subject to the will of the directive speaker. This enables the recipient to maintain autonomy over their own conduct without provoking the conflict or repeat directives associated with outright resistance.
Purpose -This chapter examines children's options for responding to parental attempts to get them to do something (directives).Methodology/approach -The data for the study are video recordings of everyday family mealtime interactions. The study uses conversation analysis and discursive psychology to conduct a microanalysis of sequences of everyday family mealtimes interactions in which a parent issues a directive and a child responds.Findings -It is very difficult for children to resist parental directives without initiating a dispute. Immediate embodied compliance was the interactionally preferred response option to a directive. Outright resistance was typically met with an upgraded and more forceful directive. Legitimate objections to compliance could be treated seriously but were not always taken as grounds for non-compliance.Research implications -The results have implications for our understandings of the notions of compliance and authority. Children's status in interaction is also discussed in light of their ability to choose whether to ratify a parent's control attempt or not.Originality/value of paper -The chapter represents original work on the interactional structures and practices involved in responding to control attempts by a co-present participant. It offers a data-driven framework for conceptualising compliance and authority in interaction that is based on the orientations of participants rather than cultural or analytical assumptions of the researcher.
In a corpus of c. 250 hours of recorded interactions between young children and adults in USA and UK households, we found that children could be directed to change their course of action by three syntactic formats that offered alternatives: an imperative, or a modal declarative, plus a consequential alternative to non-compliance (e.g. come down at once or I shall send you straight to bed; you've got to stand here with it or it goes back in the cupboard), or an interrogative requiring a preference (e.g. do you want to put them neatly in the corner for mummy please or do you wanna go to bed). Formatted syntactically as or-alternatives, these can perform the actions both of warning and threatening. But they make a 'bad' course of action contiguous to the child's turn. We argue that adults choose this format because the interactional preference for contiguity makes the negative alternative the more salient one. This implies that adults attribute to children the ability to appreciate the flouting of preference organisation for deontic effect.Offering alternatives as a way of issuing directives to children: putting the worse option last REVISION 3 January 2015Length = 8108 words Charles Antaki (1) and Alexandra Kent (2) ( course of action contiguous to the child's turn. We argue that adults choose this format because the interactional preference for contiguity makes the negative alternative the more salient one. This implies that adults attribute to children the ability to appreciate the flouting of preference organisation for deontic effect. As Stevanovic and Svennevig (this volume) say, this Special Issue adds to the body of research by reporting new work on the epistemic and deontic subtleties of the ways in which directives can be issued. In this article we explore how adults use an utterance the syntactic form of which offers children alternative courses of action to choose between; but which, on inspection of their deployment, can be seen to perform a less neutral action.To prefigure the data that we shall analyse, examples of the three types of directives that we found in our survey of various data sources are: you've got to stand here with it or it goes back in the cupboard; come down at once or I shall send you straight to bed; and do you want to put them neatly in the corner for mummy please or do you wanna go to bed. These directives use different syntactic formats, but the common thread among them is the action that the adult is performing: issuing an utterance that confronts the child with two exclusive courses of action. One of these courses is favoured; the other, not. The effect of the utterance is to issue a recommendation at best, or a threat at worst; but in any case, it is a directive, claiming some form of deontic authority, in the terminology suggested by Stevanovic (2012), and Stevanovic and Peräkylä (2012). As we shall see, there is a puzzle about how the adults set out the alternatives in one of those formats, and solving it that will be the focus of our analysis. 4 Requests, dir...
Our analysis proceeds from the question that if grammar alone is insufficient to identify the action of an imperative (e.g., offering, directing, warning, begging, etc.), how can interlocutors come to recognize the specific action being performed by a given imperative? We argue that imperative directives that occur after the directed action could have first been relevantly performed explicitly to direct the actions of the recipient and tacitly treat the absence of the action as a failure for which the recipient is accountable. The tacit nature of the accountability orientation enables both parties to focus on restoring progressivity to the directed course of action rather than topicalizing a transgression. Data are from everyday interactions in British and American English.
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