Contingency and Action: A Comparison of Two Forms of Requesting

Curl, Traci S.; Drew, Paul

doi:10.1080/08351810802028613

Cited by 558 publications

(512 citation statements)

References 29 publications

(17 reference statements)

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“…That was strongly implied in Curl and Drew's (2008) analysis of data from calls requesting house calls from out-of-hours doctors' clinics, where the caller had to negotiate the gap between their needs and the authority of the doctor, who had the decisive vote. Hence the caller's display of entitlement and awareness of contingency in the making of requests.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As helpfully outlined in the introduction to this Special Issue (Stevanovic & Svennevig, this volume), the impetus for an interactional (as opposed to a syntactic or pragmatic) study of directives can be said to have come from Heinemann's 2006 work on requests to home helpers, but perhaps more significantly from Curl and Drew's (2008) paper on telephone requests to doctors' clinics and to family members. Curl and Drew identified two factors with which one could mark one's request: the degree of entitlement one had in making it, and the degree to which one acknowledged the contingencies that the recipient might face in carrying it out.…”

Section: Requests Directives and Alternativesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Work on requesting in interaction (Lindström, 2005;Heinemann, 2006;Curl and Drew, 2008) has prompted an acceleration of interest in the varieties of ways of influencing others: from (to use rough glosses) hinting , through advising (Shaw and Hepburn, 2013), to proposing (Stevanovic 2012, Stevanovic andPeräkylä, 2012), instructing (Antaki and Kent, 2012) and outright threatening (Hepburn and Potter, 2011; see also a quantitative survey of many these types in Takada 2013).…”

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confidence: 99%

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Offering alternatives as a way of issuing directives to children: Putting the worse option last

Antaki

Kent

2015

Journal of Pragmatics

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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...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Requests Directives and Alternativesmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Offering alternatives as a way of issuing directives to children: Putting the worse option last

Antaki

Kent

2015

Journal of Pragmatics

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“…Similar to Curl and Drew (2008), modal constructions (''preparatory'') also belong to the most frequently employed requesting strategies. However, they occur with markedly lower frequencies than the imperative strategies (20.4% of all requests in AmE and 25.0% in BrE).…”

Section: Empirical Studies On Requestsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…She reports that almost all request types can be used in a variety of contextual situations. 2 In a more CA oriented approach to the study of requests, Curl and Drew (2008) compare requests in naturally occurring private telephone conversations to requests in telephone calls to a primary care physician's practice in Britain. While their approach generally is a qualitative one, the authors report that two thirds of the requests in their conversational corpus are realized by modal verbs which either question or state the hearer's ability or willingness to comply with the request (can/could/will) or imperatives.…”

Section: Empirical Studies On Requestsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Preference Organization and Cross-Cultural Variation in Request Responses: A Corpus-Based Comparison of British and American English

Flöck

Geluykens

2017

Corpus Pragmatics

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This study compares request responses in two national varieties of English, American English (AmE) and British English. The responses are manually retrieved from two corpora of English, the British component to the International Corpus of English and the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English and analyzed both for their function and format. It is shown that request responses in both varieties pattern as preference structure would predict: compliant responses occur more frequently than non-compliant ones and can thus be understood as the preferred response type to requestive first pair parts. The analysis of co-occurrence patterns of first and second pair parts reveals that the directness level of the first pair part does not significantly influence the response type of the second pair part. It does, however, have an impact on the level of explicitness of the response. While cross-cultural differences in request responses are generally rare in the present database, they do surface in the higher numbers for implicit compliance in the AmE corpus. These results show the importance of a cross-cultural approach to the study of naturally occurring request responses retrieved from corpora of authentic speech.

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2012

The Handbook of Conversation Analysis

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Contingency and Action: A Comparison of Two Forms of Requesting

Abstract: 3

Cited by 558 publications

References 29 publications

Offering alternatives as a way of issuing directives to children: Putting the worse option last

Offering alternatives as a way of issuing directives to children: Putting the worse option last

Preference Organization and Cross-Cultural Variation in Request Responses: A Corpus-Based Comparison of British and American English

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