Imperative Turns at Talk: The design of directives in action

443 Pages·2017·42.015 MB·Studies in Language and Social Interaction 30

by  Marja-Leena Sorjonen (editor), Liisa Raevaara (editor), Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen (editor)

Imperative Turns
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The design of directives in action
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John Benjamins Publishing Company
Imperative Turns at Talk
Studies in Language and Social Interaction (SLSI)
issn 1879-3983
Studies in Language and Social Interaction is a series which continues the tradition of
Studies in Discourse and Grammar, but with a new focus. It aims to provide a forum
for research on grammar, understood broadly, in its natural home environment,
spoken interaction. The assumption underlying the series is that the study of
language as it is actually used in social interaction provides the foundation for
understanding how the patterns and regularities we think of as grammar emerge
from everyday communicative needs. The editors welcome language-related research
from a range of different methodological traditions, including conversation analysis,
interactional linguistics, and discourse-functional linguistics.
For an overview of all books published in this series, please see
http://benjamins.com/catalog/slsi
Editors
Sandra A. Thompson Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen
University of California, Santa Barbara, USA University of Helsinki, Finland
Editorial Board
Peter Auer Barbara A. Fox
University of Freiburg, Germany University of Colorado, USA
Paul Drew Marja-Liisa Helasvuo
Loughborough University, UK University of Turku, Finland
Cecilia E. Ford K.K. Luke
University of Wisconsin, USA Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Volume 30
Imperative Turns at Talk. The design of directives in action
Edited by Marja-Leena Sorjonen, Liisa Raevaara, and Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen
Imperative Turns at Talk
The design of directives in action
Edited by
Marja-Leena Sorjonen
Liisa Raevaara
Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen
University of Helsinki
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam / Philadelphia
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
8
the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
doi 10.1075/slsi.30
Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from Library of Congress:
lccn 2017014781 (print) / 2017031201 (e-book)
isbn 978 90 272 2640 2 (Hb)
isbn 978 90 272 6552 4 (e-book)
© 2017 – John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any
other means, without written permission from the publisher.
John Benjamins Publishing Company · https://benjamins.com
Table of contents
Chapter 1
Imperative turns at talk: An introduction 1
Marja-Leena Sorjonen, Liisa Raevaara, and Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen
Part 1. Structure and use of imperative turns
Chapter 2
A cline of visible commitment in the situated design of imperative turns:
Evidence from German and Polish 27
Jörg Zinken and Arnulf Deppermann
Chapter 3
Precision timing and timed embeddedness of imperatives in embodied
courses of action: Examples from French 65
Lorenza Mondada
Chapter 4
Secondary and deviant uses of the imperative for requesting in Italian 103
Giovanni Rossi
Chapter 5
Three imperative action formats in Danish talk-in-interaction:
The case of imperative + modal particles bare and lige 139
Trine Heinemann and Jakob Steensig
Chapter 6
Requests for here-and-now actions in Russian conversation 175
Galina Bolden
Part 2. Sequences with imperative turns
Chapter 7
In the face of resistance: A Finnish practice for insisting on imperatively
formatted directives 215
Marja Etelämäki and Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen
vi Imperative Turns at Talk
Chapter 8
Imperatives and responsiveness in Finnish conversation 241
Marja-Leena Sorjonen
Chapter 9
Negotiating deontic rights in second position: Young adult daughters’
imperatively formatted responses to mothers’ offers in Estonian 271
Leelo Keevallik
Part 3. Sequences with imperative turns in asymmetric situations
Chapter 10
Imperatives in Swedish medical consultations 299
Jan Lindström, Camilla Lindholm, Catrin Norrby, Camilla Wide
and Jenny Nilsson
Chapter 11
Assigning roles and responsibilities: Finnish imperatively formatted
directive actions in a mobile instructional setting 325
Mirka Rauniomaa
Chapter 12
Managing compliance in violin instruction: The case of the Finnish
clitic particles -pA and -pAs in imperatives and hortatives 357
Melisa Stevanovic
Chapter 13
Adjusting the design of directives to the activity environment:
Imperatives in Finnish cooking club interaction 381
Liisa Raevaara
Chapter 14
Epilogue: Imperatives – The language of immediate action 411
Peter Auer
Appendix
Transcription conventions 425
Name index 429
Subject index 433
Chapter 1
Imperative turns at talk
An introduction
Marja-Leena Sorjonen, Liisa Raevaara,
and Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen
University of Helsinki
Across all societies, speech communities, and interactional encounters, situations
arise in which we need to get someone to do something. While there are numer-
ous ways of achieving this, imperatives are recognized by linguists as the principal
grammaticized form for directing others. Yet ironically enough, pragmatic linguis-
tic research has primarily focused on directives that are implemented in ways other
than with imperatives (i.e., on “indirect” speech acts, Searle 1975).
Moreover, among language users in the middle-class Anglo-speaking world,
the use of imperatives – outside of parent-child interaction, where they can be an
effective means for regulating children’s behavior – is often perceived as impolite. 1
The papers in this volume, which deal primarily with interactions among adults
in a wide variety of everyday and institutional settings, de-construct this lay belief
and show that imperatives have a widely varied and normatively regulated use for
the implementation of particular social actions in specifiable interactional situa-
tions and settings. There are significant differences in the resources for forming
imperatives (e.g., aspectual marking, number marking) and for building imperative
turns (e.g., modal particles, enclitics) among the languages considered here. Yet the
actions the imperative turns are used to implement are the same across languages
(e.g., requests, advice, instruction, etc.) and the pragmatic appropriateness of using
an imperative turn is associated with similar types of situations. This suggests that
there are cross-linguistic aspects of imperative turn design and general pragmatic
dimensions of situations and settings that warrant the use of such turns. The present
volume explores these in naturally occurring social interaction, and provides new
insights into the processes involved when social actors work to get another to do
something.
1. For example, Cambridge Dictionaries Online (s.v. Politeness) states, “Being direct is impolite
so we need to be careful when using direct forms… In most contexts, the imperative is very direct
and is usually impolite.”
doi 10.1075/slsi.30.01sor
© 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company
2 Marja-Leena Sorjonen, Liisa Raevaara, and Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen
1. Prior research
Imperatives have recently been subjected to detailed typological and grammatical
studies in different languages. Xrakovskij (2001), starting from a universal defini-
tion of the “imperative concept”, describes imperative sentences and the verb forms
used in them in 23 structurally different languages. Aikhenvald (2010) offers an
in-depth study of the morpho-syntactic forms categorized as imperatives in a wide
range of languages, together with considerations that permit a differentiation be-
tween imperative forms and the function of commanding. Jary and Kissine (2014)
present an account of the semantics and pragmatics of the imperative sentence type.
All the above-mentioned studies provide detailed structural information about the
imperative in an impressive range of languages. But their findings are based pri-
marily on reference grammars and native speaker consultations: they lack empirical
validation from actual language use.
From early on, imperatives have played a role in politeness models (Brown
and Levinson 1987; Leech 1983; Watts 2003). In Brown and Levinson’s influential
model, imperatives are seen as a bald, on-record strategy for carrying out face-
threatening acts; consequently they are said to be avoided unless special circum-
stances warrant their use. Subsequent research has focused above all on off-record,
indirect face-saving strategies (see, e.g., Hickey and Stewart 2005). Politeness has
become an influential framework for analyzing directives, and new models and
accounts of linguistic politeness continue to be proposed (e.g., Leech 2014). Yet
while politeness models deal with a dimension of interaction which is recognized
by ordinary language users in the sense that (im)politeness is part of the everyday
vernacular in many languages and cultures, they are predicated on the assumption
that certain linguistic forms have an intrinsic degree of politeness, independent
of interactional or sequential context. This volume questions such an assumption.
Imperatives have also figured in cross-cultural pragmatic studies, which have
set out to unravel empirically the realization of speech acts and politeness. An
early influential study in this area was the volume edited by Blum-Kulka, House,
and Kasper (1989), which focused on requests and apologies. The methodology of
this line of research has been subjected to various modifications, and research in
this area continues to be influential (e.g., Sifianou 1992; Fukushima 2000; Márquez
Reiter 2000; Ogiermann 2009; Salgado 2011). In contrast to typological and gram-
matical research on the imperative, cross-cultural pragmatic studies have as their
starting point different means for realizing selected speech acts, which can vary
in ways that are sensitive to cultural conventions and constraints. These studies
devise dialogues (Discourse Completion Tasks) that cover different situations in
which the target speech acts might be produced, varying the situations in terms
of the participants’ relationship (e.g., degree of familiarity, social power, gender,
Chapter 1. Imperative turns at talk 3
age, etc.). Many of these studies make use of the distinction between direct and
indirect strategies and of the notion of face-threatening act, imperatives figuring
as a prototypical direct “bald-on-record” form.
A different type of approach to directives bringing cultural values to the fore is
that by Wierzbicka (1985, 2003), whose “natural semantic metalanguage” frame-
work is developed, however, on the basis of decontextualized examples from liter-
ature and other written sources.
What unites the research on imperatives mentioned so far is that it utilizes
data that have been typified or removed from their context of occurrence. Studies
on imperatives in actually occurring discourse are rare. One exception is Vine
(2004), who has investigated power in workplace interaction through the analysis
of “control acts” in audiotaped interactions between workplace colleagues with
differing organizational statuses. Her study focuses qualitatively and quantitatively
on the grammatical form of single speech acts, and privileges the symmetrical vs.
asymmetrical role of social relationships in accounting for the use of imperatives
and other directive forms. The embeddedness of directive acts in the temporal and
sequential progression of larger activities, however, is not considered.
In sum, the approaches mentioned above contribute in various ways to an un-
derstanding of the verbal realization of directive actions. Yet what is missing so far
is research that provides an empirically grounded appreciation of the situatedness of
directive turns and their design, including their embedding in practical, embodied
activities, where material artefacts and differing spatial arrangements come to bear
(for a related broadening of the notion of “request” see Drew and Couper-Kuhlen
2014 and Kendrick and Drew 2016). In particular, the pragmatic dimensions that
warrant the usability of imperative turns on particular occasions of spoken and
embodied interaction have remained unexplored.
Conversation-analytically informed research on naturally occurring interac-
tion in different settings and interactional role configurations is just beginning
to reveal the kinds of considerations that affect the choice of an imperative turn
design and the specific uses that imperative turn formats can be put to (see Craven
and Potter 2010; Mondada 2011; Rossi 2012; Zinken and Ogiermann 2013; Zinken
2016). The papers in this volume pursue this promising avenue of investigation in
a more systematic and comprehensive manner.
2. Profile of the volume
The papers in the present volume examine imperative forms not by themselves but
in their natural habitat, turns at talk. At issue is not only the choice of an imperative
as opposed to, for example, a declarative or interrogative form, but also what else