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

Stevanovic, Melisa; Peräkylä, Anssi

doi:10.1080/08351813.2012.699260

Cited by 456 publications

(372 citation statements)

References 54 publications

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“…These were all directives of a rather forceful kind. This is to be set against Stevanovic and Peräkylä's (2012) observation that deontic authority over another person is something to be handled delicately.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…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.…”

mentioning

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%

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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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“…Sequence-initiating actions have also been shown to be sensitive to sequential position, taking different forms in different environments (Curl, 2006;Rossi, 2012Rossi, , 2014Wootton, 1997;Zinken & Ogiermann, 2013). In a more recent turn, the specification of context thought relevant for action recognition has been radically extended beyond the local sequence to include properties of individuals, such as epistemic status (Heritage, 2012), deontic authority (Stevanovic & Peräkylä, 2012), and personal benefit (Clayman & Heritage, 2014).…”

Section: Grammar and Actionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Imperative Directives: Orientations to Accountability

Kent

Kendrick

2016

Research on Language and Social Interaction

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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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“…In turn, weak claims to deontic rights correspond to a low display of entitlement and a high display of contingency. Following Stevanovic and Peräkylä (2012), Thompson et al (2015) suggest that participants in conversation strive to achieve a situation of deontic congruence in which a requester's strong deontic rights are met with a display of weak deontic rights on the part of the requestee. As the authors relate the display of agency in responding to requests to a display of strong deontic rights, the response forms identified can be correlated with the pattern established.…”

Section: Empirical Studies On Request Responsesmentioning

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

Cited by 456 publications

References 54 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

Imperative Directives: Orientations to Accountability

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

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