Deontic Authority in Interaction: The Right to Announce, Propose, and Decide

Abstract

Someone's “deontic authority” is their right to determine others' future actions. It can be acquiesced to or resisted. This article introduces, more systematically than before, the concept to close examination of talk-in-interaction. Drawing on video recordings of planning meetings as data and on conversation analysis as a method, we examine two classes of utterances: (a) first speakers' suggestions for future events and (b) second speakers' responses, which, besides acquiescing to or resisting these plans, also acquiesce to or resist the first speakers' rights to make them. Where the second speakers align with the deontic rights allocated to them by the first speakers, we call this “deontic congruence.” “Deontic incongruence,” on the other hand, is where the second speaker resists the suggested distribution of deontic rights. These are far-reaching claims in social life, and we show how they are displayed in the organization of talk.

Notes

¹We are grateful to Ann-Carita Evaldsson and Asta Cekaite for bringing the Sterponi article to our attention. Zinken and Ogiermann's article appeared after this article was accepted for publication, and we regret that we could only give a summary reference to it.

²In the data extracts of this article, we have tried to find English translations that would reflect the deontic/epistemic division—as far as possible—as does the original Finnish. In this case, for example, a more idiomatic translation of the cantor's proposal would have been: “As the praise Hymn we might take.” However, to preserve the ambiguity between the epistemic and deontic interpretations of the Finnish modal verb vois, we translated it more literally as could, which allows for various senses of possibility and constraint, both epistemic and deontic. From this point of view, it is ultimately the pastor's approving response to the cantor's proposal that reveals the participants' orientation to the cantor's initial utterance as a proposal with deontic implications, and not as an (epistemic) informing about the possibilities that the participants have—an issue to be addressed in detail in a separate study (authors, in preparation).