Requesting and Responding in Italian and English Service Encounters

Business and Service Telephone Conversations

“…Its non-systematic and infrequent use is associated only with one type of response, the non-satisfying one. These results contrast slightly with the difference found by Zorzi (1990), Aston (1988a) and Brodine (1991) between Italian and British shop assistants when providing non-satisfying responses. In their analysis they found that British Rs often provided a remedial sequence prefacing the non-granting response, whereas in the Italian data they found such sequences after the news was delivered.…”

“…Levinson (1983, p. 334) included in the features for dispreferred parts only one of the extensions used by the speakers in the data analysed here: the formulation of accounts. The analysis of bookshop service encounters also found that the shop assistants volunteered an alternative solution to the book requested (Pixi Project, Aston, 1988a;Zorzi, 1990;Brodine, 1991). The analysis has pointed out another way of making the response take a dispreferred character, namely by providing extra information about the service required, although this has not been requested.…”

“…the offer of an account that justifies and explains the response provided, then followed by the offer of an alternative solution. Aston (1988a), Zorzi (1990) and Brodine (1991), working on bookshop service encounters for the Pixi project, also found the offer of an alternative solution as part of the remedial work initiated by the shop assistant when the book searched for was not available and the customer's request could not be met.…”

“…This is the object of this book. Previous studies focused on the construction of such relationships between service providers and customers in face-to-face encounters, as in the work of the Pixi project in which English and Italian bookshop encounters were compared (Aston, 1988a;Zorzi, 1990;Brodine, 1991), and the interactions between the employees of a reprographic store's drop-off counter and their customers by Vinkhuyzen and Szymanski (2005), in which non-granting requests were analysed. The way speakers deal with the business on the phone has only recently been explored by Lee (2011a), in her analysis of a distinctive type of telephone conversation, i.e.…”

“…Past studies have focused on talk in courtrooms (Atkinson and Drew, 1979), classrooms (McHoul, 1978;Mehan, 1979), medical consultations (Silverman, 1987;Sarangi and Roberts, 1999), interviews (Greatbatch, 1988), service encounters (Aston, 1988a;Zorzi, 1990;Brodine, 1991;Luke and Pavlidou, 2002;Thüne and Leonardi, 2003;Vinkhuyzen and Szymanski, 2005;Lee 2011a, b), and emergency calls (Whalen and Zimmerman, 1987;Zimmerman, 1984;Monzoni and Zorzi, 2003). Such studies have led to the definition of talk in institutional settings as differing 'from ordinary conversation in systematic ways' (Hester and Francis, 2001).…”