Composite Social Actions: The Case of Factual Declaratives in Everyday Interaction

ABSTRACT

When taking a turn at talk, a speaker normally accomplishes a sequential action such as a question, answer, complaint, or request. Sometimes, however, a turn at talk may accomplish not a single but a composite action, involving a combination of more than one action. I show that factual declaratives (e.g., “the feed drip has finished”) are recurrently used to implement composite actions consisting of both an informing and a request or, alternatively, a criticism and a request. A key determinant between these is the recipient’s epistemic access to what the speaker is describing. Factual declaratives afford a range of possible responses, which can tell us how the composite action has been understood and give us insights into its underlying structure. Evidence for the stacking of composite actions, however, is not always directly available in the response and may need to be pieced together with the help of other linguistic and contextual considerations. Data are in Italian with English translation.

Notes

¹ Of course, there is by now a large body of CA research on the design of “first actions” focusing on the selection and organization of alternative forms for implementing questions, requests, offers, proposals, assessments, among other actions. However, this is a distinct analytic issue (see also Drew & Couper-Kuhlen, 2014, p. 13). Explaining people’s use of alternative forms of action tells us how those forms of action are sensitive and adapted to different social-interactional circumstances, but it does not in itself tell us how those forms come to embody and to be interpreted as a certain action in the first place.

² The permissions obtained include the use of images without face anonymization.

³ This percentage is given only as an approximation. While the majority of sequences in this group clearly involve informing as a main action besides requesting, a few exhibit nuances that may preclude a strict categorization. The phenomenon under analysis does not lend itself to formal quantification (Stivers, 2015, p. 13), at least within the limits of the present study.

⁴ In this respect, the sequence bears some resemblance with a pattern observed by Pomerantz (1978), where a “wrongdoing” is initially brought up with an agentless report of an “unhappy incident,” deferring attributions of blame to later in the interaction. Thank you to John Heritage for pointing out this connection.

⁵ As explained in the introduction, “main action” is intended as an action that has sequential import, an action that can stand alone and make another main action relevant next (e.g., request > compliance/refusal; informing > receipt), to be distinguished from an action’s epistemic modulation or affective coloring, for instance. The status of “main action” is a separate issue from the hierarchical relation between two main actions.

⁶ Even when complaints come in the guise of rhetorical questions, these are understood as asserting rather than seeking information (Monzoni, 2009, p. 2468; Heritage, 2012, p. 23).

Additional information

Funding

This work began in the Language and Cognition Department at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, with support from the European Research Council (grant no. 240853 to N. J. Enfield). It was then continued and completed at the Finnish Center of Excellence in Research on Intersubjectivity in Interaction, supported by the Academy of Finland (grant no. 284595).