1 / 13

Conversation, Context and Action: Requesting

Conversation, Context and Action: Requesting. Paul Drew (with Traci Curl/Walker & Richard Ogden) University of York UK. Context: the immediate prior turn at talk. Deixis, especially pronominalisation Repetition of words & phrases in prior turn Ellipsis (Paired) social actions.

imani-goodman
Download Presentation

Conversation, Context and Action: Requesting

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Conversation, Context and Action: Requesting Paul Drew (with Traci Curl/Walker & Richard Ogden) University of York UK

  2. Context: the immediate prior turn at talk • Deixis, especially pronominalisation • Repetition of words & phrases in prior turn • Ellipsis • (Paired) social actions

  3. Context: what participants know about one another • Address terms (“Roul’s mother”in ex. 8) • What’s going on in one another’s lives • Implicitness, irony and collusion (ex.9) • Deixis and relationship (Fillmore’s ‘social deixis’)(compare coming and going in exs. 10 & 11)

  4. Requesting, & context Participants/speakers also orient to context when making requests - in their selection of which form of request to use

  5. Two frequently used request forms • Modals (“Could you…”) - used in social calls between family and friends (ex.13) • “I was wondering if…” forms used when phoning institutional agency, workplace or similar (exs. 14 & 15)

  6. …but modals may be used in institutional talk • Express urgency of situation • Used by persons with institutional identities • So selection reflects entitlement and contingency

  7. Entitlement & Contingency Continuum from High entitlement/Low contingency (Imperative forms etc.) to Low entitlement/High contingency (“I wonder if…”)

  8. Speakers’ orientations to appropriate request forms Moment-by-moment adjustments in design of turn (self-repair) - specifically of the request form to be used - reflects participants’ orientations to context, and ‘possibility’ of granting (contingency) (Exs.18 & 19)

  9. Calls to the police • In emergency calls (999) to police, callers generally do not use overt request forms; just report an incident • When they make explicit requests, generally use modal forms • Modal forms indicate entitlement to request urgent assistance

  10. Context changes • In ex.22 context changes in same call • Lines 1-16 speaks to operator • Urgency - high entitlement in descriptions of incident • Lines 20-42 speaks to police officer • Degrades urgency

  11. When calls go wrong • Inappropriate assessments of entitlement/contingency • Either call-taker mis-asseses caller’s entitlement (ex.23) • Or caller mis-assesses their entitlement (re the ‘urgency’ or ‘police-ability’ of their request) (exs. 24 & 25)

  12. General findings • Request forms reflect participants’ orientations to entitlement & contingency • Represents the grammaticalization of social relations • Claims encoded in modal forms can be used ‘strategically’, to claim greater entitlement and greater urgency than event warrants (exs.24 & 25)

  13. Concluding themes • Again, language delivers action • Different grammatical formats of social action (requests) • Index speakers’ understandings of ‘context’, i.e. urgency of incident, entitlement to request service etc.

More Related