Reason-for-calling invitations in Italian telephone calls: Action design and recipient commitment

Abstract

This paper investigates three main formats for reason-for-calling invitations in Italian telephone calls and shows that these invitation formats are designed to include an informing/descriptive component and a requesting component. These two elements are encoded and foregrounded differently in the design of each format, constructing diverse ways to name, refer to or describe the social occasion that recipients are invited to attend and different ways of requesting the invitees to state their commitment to participate. Our findings provide evidence that, by using one of the three formats, speakers are able to tailor the invitation to the different contextual conditions in which they and their recipients may be when the invitation is made, as well as to the circumstances of the social event, with the inviters often displaying caution in extending the invitation. This paper also investigates the types of constraints on the degree of commitment from the invitation recipient that each format entails, offering a contribution to study preference organization in first actions.

I understand you feel that way, but I feel this way: the benefits of I-language and communicating perspective during conflict

“…As an example, consider the action of making an invitation (Bella & Moser, 2018; Margutti & Galatolo, 2018). What might be the best way to solicit a commitment?…”

Peer Review #2 of "I understand you feel that way, but I feel this way: the benefits of I-language and communicating perspective during conflict (v0.1)"

“…Another avenue for future research is to specifically investigate if communicating perspective, or I-language and you-language, have different effects across discursive actions such as requesting, describing, questioning, criticizing, blaming, offering alternatives, rejecting, refusing, inviting, and so on. As an example, consider the action of making an invitation (Bella & Moser, 2018;Margutti & Galatolo, 2018). What might be the best way to solicit a commitment?…”

Digital-Based Genuine Invitation Strategies of Najdi Arabic Speakers: A Socio-Pragmatic Analysis

“…Extending an invitation is a recurrent social behavior that can occur among friends and relatives in daily encounters as well as among acquaintances and strangers in more formal settings. It is a cultural activity that is frequently used to create connections, promote social solidarity, consolidate interpersonal bonds among community members, and, sometimes, achieve institutional or inexplicit ends (Margutti & Galatolo, 2018). In the Arab culture, an invitation is a regular social activity defined by some cultural rituals and formulas as well as mutually shared values, making it intuitive for interlocutors to properly extend, perceive, and respond to invitations.…”

“…Despite the increasing volume of research on the realizations and cross-cultural differences of speech acts over the past three decades, the speech act of invitation has been relatively overlooked, particularly in non-Western languages (Margutti & Galatolo, 2018). Because research on speech acts is affected by severe ethnocentricity (Bauler, 2022), there is a dearth of literature on invitations in Arabic (Abdelhady, 2015;Al-Ali, 2006;Al-Khatib, 2006;Naim, 2011;Nassar, Saad, & Nordin, 2020;Oraby, 2020), let alone invitations in Saudi Najdi Arabic, a comparatively less investigated context.…”

“…This could be owing to several reasons. First, invitation exchange involves a sequence of turns between the inviter and the invitee, which makes data collection and organization more problematic, especially for natural observation methods (Margutti & Galatolo, 2018). Second, empirical evidence emerging from cross-cultural studies suggests that a particular community's sociocultural norms and expectations fundamentally affect both the inviters' linguistic behavior and the invitees' perceptions (Bauler, 2022).…”