Mobilizing Others: Grammar and Lexis Within Larger Activities

293 Pages·2020·35.479 MB·Studies in Language and Social Interaction

by  Emma Betz (editor), Carmen Taleghani-nikazm (editor), Peter Golato (editor)

Mobilizing Others
Grammar and lexis
within larger activities
S
t
u
d
i
e
s Edited by

i
n
Carmen Taleghani-Nikazm, Emma Betz

L
a
n and Peter Golato
g
u
a
g
e

a
n
d

S
o
c
i
a
l

I
n
t
e
r
a
c
t
i
o
n
33
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Mobilizing Others
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
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
Galina Bolden Makoto Hayashi
Rutgers University, USA Nagoya University, Japan
Arnulf Deppermann Marja-Liisa Helasvuo
Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Germany University of Turku, Finland
Paul Drew K.K. Luke
University of York, UK Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Volume 33
Mobilizing Others. Grammar and lexis within larger activities
Edited by Carmen Taleghani-Nikazm, Emma Betz and Peter Golato
Mobilizing Others
Grammar and lexis within larger activities
Edited by
Carmen Taleghani-Nikazm
The Ohio State University
Emma Betz
University of Waterloo
Peter Golato
Texas State University
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.33
Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from Library of Congress:
lccn 2019049837 (print) / 2019049838 (e-book)
isbn 978 90 272 0492 9 (Hb)
isbn 978 90 272 6158 8 (e-book)
© 2020 – 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
Mobilizing others: An introduction 1
Emma Betz, Carmen Taleghani-Nikazm and Peter Golato
Chapter 2
Requesting here-and-now actions with two imperative formats
in Korean interaction 19
Stephanie Hyeri Kim and Mary Shin Kim
Chapter 3
Mobilizing for the next relevant action:
Managing progressivity in card game interactions 47
Carmen Taleghani-Nikazm, Veronika Drake, Andrea Golato
and Emma Betz
Chapter 4
Recruitments in French: Declarative statements and accompanying actions
which result in offers of assistance 83
Peter Golato
Chapter 5
Mobilizing student compliance: On the directive use of Finnish
second-person declaratives and interrogatives during violin instruction 115
Melisa Stevanovic
Chapter 6
Linguistic structures emerging in the synchronization of a Pilates class 147
Leelo Keevallik
Chapter 7
Multimodal mechanisms for mobilizing students to give pre-structured
responses in French L2 classroom interaction 175
Kirby Chazal
vi Mobilizing Others
Chapter 8
Mobilizing others when you have little (recognizable) language 203
Charles Antaki, W. M. L. Finlay and Chris Walton
Chapter 9
When emergencies are not urgent: Requesting help
in calls to 911 Costa Rica 229
Alexa Bolaños-Carpio
Chapter 10
Doing more than expected: Thanking recognizes another’s agency
in providing assistance 253
Jörg Zinken, Giovanni Rossi and Vasudevi Reddy
Appendix
Glossary of transcription conventions 279
Index 283
Chapter 1
Mobilizing others
An introduction
Emma Betz, Carmen Taleghani-Nikazm and Peter Golato
University of Waterloo / The Ohio State University / Texas State University
“Mobilizing others” takes a holistic perspective on the practices that we use to
get others to act with, and for, us. This introduction reviews recent conceptual
developments, notably ‘recruitment’ (Section 1), and then opens up new ter-
ritory by arguing for a more explicit focus on ‘activity’ in describing how mo-
bilizing moves are accountably produced and understood. After summarizing
existing research on ‘activity’ (2) we highlight how embodiment and temporality
figure crucially in interactants’ use of grammatical, vocal, and embodied re-
sources to reflexively organize larger courses of action (3). Focusing on ‘situation
design’ captures the importance of the overall activity for the design, placement,
and understanding of mobilizing turns, and makes visible implicit layers of orga-
nization which relevantly shape local conduct.
Mobilizing others to act: Requesting and recruitment
Since the inception of Conversation Analysis, ways of mobilizing others to act have
garnered much interest in the literature, most of it through the lens of ‘requests’ (for
an overview, see Drew and Couper-Kuhlen 2014; Fox and Heinemann 2015, 2016,
2017, 2019; Taleghani-Nikazm 2006).1 More recent research has moved away from
‘requests’ as an entry point to practices for mobilizing others to act and from the
traditional understanding of requesting as a category with specific linguistic forms.
This has allowed for a more holistic analysis of how participants cooperate by join-
ing, assisting, or helping others and thus contributing jointly to courses of action.
1. Work includes Gill et al. 2001; Curl and Drew 2008; Couper-Kuhlen 2014; Davidson 1984;
Deppermann 2018a; Drew and Couper-Kuhlen 2014; Floyd, Rossi, and Enfield in print; Fox
and Heinemann 2015, 2016; Kendrick and Drew 2014, 2016; Lindström 1999, 2005; Rossi 2012,
2017, 2018; Rossi and Zinken 2016; Sorjonen et al. 2017a; Stevanovic 2011; Taleghani-Nikazm
2005, 2006; Thompson et al. 2015; Zinken 2015, 2016; Zinken and Deppermann 2017; Zinken
and Ogiermann 2013.
https://doi.org/10.1075/slsi.33.01bet
© 2020 John Benjamins Publishing Company
2 Emma Betz, Carmen Taleghani-Nikazm and Peter Golato
The concept of ‘recruitment’ (Drew and Couper-Kuhlen 2014; Kendrick and Drew
2016; Drew and Kendrick 2018) has broadened the discussion of the interactional
structure of actions such as requesting, proposing, and offering. Recruitment is
understood not as “a social action, nor a class of social actions, but … an interac-
tional outcome or effect” (Kendrick and Drew 2016: 2). Participants in interaction
have a range of practical methods for recruiting someone; these include various
ways of soliciting assistance as well as ways of resolving another’s perceived (but
not explicitly verbalized) trouble or need. As a result, requests and offers can be
viewed as connected and organized on a continuum, with one end point comprising
self-initiated explicit solicitation of assistance (requests), and with the other end
point encompassing other-initiated volunteering of assistance without its explicitly
being asked for (offers). The latter are situations which are regularly occasioned
by visible and embodied trouble. For example, when a participant has difficulty
opening a jar, they may either explicitly request another participant’s help, or an-
other participant may offer to open the jar upon noticing the difficulty (Drew and
Kendrick 2018). Thus, Drew and Kendrick’s concept of recruitment focuses on the
embodied and publicly visible display of trouble or need and the Other’s here-and-
now assistance or contribution (cf. Enfield 2014; Zinken and Rossi 2016).2
The more holistic study of the organization of recruitment has brought into
view the importance of joint projects (Enfield 2014; Rossi 2012, 2014; Zinken 2016;
Zinken and Deppermann 2017) for understanding what informs the linguistic
choices participants make in local contexts. This in turn has revealed the relevance
of factors beyond the current sequence and led to studies aiming to unpack the “re-
lation of the nominated action to the on-going activity” (Sorjonen et al. 2017b: 12;
see also Curl and Drew 2008). The present volume further develops this line of
research by illustrating the many ways in which the relevance of the ongoing activity
and its participation structures enters into the design, placement, and understand-
ing of turns which mobilize others to act.
Mobilizing others to act: The relevance of ‘activity’
The interplay among linguistic (grammatical, lexical) and embodied resources, action
trajectories, and the interactional setting in which an action is performed emerges
as a crucial nexus in each study within this volume. Taken together, the studies show
how a focus on this complex interplay enhances our understanding of how inter-
actants “come to select the particular forms of social actions, in interaction” (Drew
2. This distinguishes their framework of recruitment methods from actions which express need
and solicit help on some future occasion (Heritage 2016).
Chapter 1. Mobilizing others 3
2013: 18). In other words, the studies in this volume illustrate how interactants design
their turns not only for their specific recipients, but also for a specific situation, to
mobilize others’ cooperation, contribution, or assistance in the most economical
ways. Analogous to the term “recipient design,” we propose to call the ways in which
interactants’ local, moment-by-moment choices of grammatical format reflexively
organize larger (ordered) courses of action in interaction “situation design.”3
This relates to existing conversation analytic, pragmatic, and sociological re-
search on the concept of ‘activity’, typically understood to apply to stretches of
interaction beyond individual actions and beyond two-part sequences, in which
smaller units (actions, sequences) relate to each other to form a recognizable whole.
Because they set up “activity-specific rules of inference,” which in turn “help to
determine how what one says will be ‘taken’ – that is, what kinds of inferences will
be made from what is said” (Levinson 1979: 393), activities shape expectations as to
what constitutes allowable contributions (cf. Levinson 1979 on activity type; Linell
and Thunquist 2003; Thomas 1995). The term ‘activity’ has been used to refer to
the opening phase of a conversation (Robinson 2012), a goal-defined task within
a classroom setting (Lerner 1995), the reason for a get-together (e.g., cooking,
dinner, playing a game), and also to recognizable phases of a given get-together
(e.g., cutting vegetables). These examples already show that the scale and scope of
‘activity’ can vary greatly. The body of conversation analytic work discussing such
“supra-sequential coherence” (Robinson 2012: 258) and its generic forms in more
theoretical terms is small (see Lerner 1995; Mazeland 2019; Robinson 2012), and
thus the relation of ‘activity’ to the concepts of turn and sequence and to principles
of turn-taking and sequence organization in interaction is not precisely defined.4
The notion of ‘activity’ has, however, emerged as an important concept in em-
pirical work. It helps capture how participants in joint action “make sense of an
utterance by analysing its features together with its environment of use as a unit”
(Mazeland 2019: 57). Pioneering research on the relevance of ‘activity’ in every-day
interaction was done by Jefferson, who argued that troubles talk constitutes “a dis-
crete organizational domain, shaping the interaction in distinctive ways” (Jefferson
1988: 438; Jefferson 2015). A range of conversation analytic work has since demon-
strated how the relevance of larger structures such as ‘activity’ manifests itself in
the verbal and embodied details of interaction and is at the same time achieved
3. We are grateful to Andrea Golato for having suggested this term.
4. Relevant discussions can be found under different headings. Concepts which relate to or
overlap with ‘activity’ include “social activity” (Heritage and Sorjonen 1994), “project of action”
(Jefferson and Lee 1980; Robinson 2003), “plan of action” (Levinson 2012), “interactional proj-
ect” (Schegloff 2007: 244–249; Levinson 2012; see also Rossano and Liebal 2014 on requests and
offers as interactional projects), “sequences of sequences” (Schegloff 2007) and “overall structural
organization” (Sacks 1992).