What does grammar tell us about action?

Abstract

Using cases of misalignment and realignment in the unfolding of interactional sequences in which future actions and events are being negotiated in everyday English conversation, this paper demonstrates that participants distinguish between the initiating actions of Proposal*, Offer*, Request*, and Suggestion*, if these labels are understood as technical terms for distinct constellations of answers to the questions (i) who will carry out the future action? and (ii) who will benefit from it?. The argument made is that these different action types are routinely associated with different sets of recurrent linguistic forms, orsocial action formats, and that it is through these that speakers can frame their turns as implementing one action type as opposed to another and that recipients can recognize these actions as such and respond to them accordingly. The fact that there is only a limited amount of ‘polysemy’, or overlap in the formats commonly used for Proposals*, Requests*, Offers*, and Suggestions* in English conversation, means that these formats deliver often distinctive cues to the type of action being implemented. When misalignments and realignments occur, they can often be traced to the fact that ‘polysemous’ linguistic formats have been used to implement the initiating action.

Introduction: Epistemics and deontics in conversational directives

“…These studies of imperative requests and their alternatives suggest that the relationship between different linguistic formats and the deontic claims that they embody is complex and informed by many different aspects of the social world, such as the participants' individual or collective commitment to the activity in course, their status as potential beneficiaries of the action requested (benefactivity), their relative responsibility for the existing undesirable state of affairs (fault) and their relative capacity or opportunity to act on it (Clayman and Heritage, 2015;Couper-Kuhlen, 2014).…”

Well -prefaced turns in English conversation: A conversation analytic perspective

“…20) as agentive moves toward closings. Or again, it appears that suggestions, which my-sidedly propose a course of action for the recipient (Couper-Kuhlen, 2013), are frequently prefaced with well --a frequency that may also be understood in 'my side' terms. As many authors have noted, well is an exceptionally complex and elusive discourse particle.…”

The Contributions of Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics to a Usage‐Based Understanding of Language: Expanding the Transdisciplinary Framework

“…Analysis from this perspective is concerned with the study of interaction as it unfolds in real time and space, focusing on sequences of interdependent actions that are taken to be “co‐relevant and causally‐conditionally related” (Enfield, , p. 287). Drawing, for the most part, on CA methods and the analytic framework of modern descriptive linguistics (Couper–Kuhlen & Selting, ), IL research poses questions that are concerned with uncovering the linguistic practices that are fitted to particular social action formats, defined as “recurrent and sedimented ways of accomplishing specific social actions in talk‐in‐interaction” (Couper–Kuhlen, , p. 624; Fox, ).…”